It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference “the president” refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
To know is not less than to feel.
Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.
It’s a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.
There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!
The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
What I wouldn’t give to be seventy again!
Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.
The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.
Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.
A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.
What a new face courage puts on everything. – Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil that has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.
The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.