Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
There is so much data available to us, but most data won’t help us succeed.
Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
A man’s perfection is his work.
That a Parliament, especially a Parliament with Newspaper Reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very nature cannot do work, but can do talk only.
All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.