Voltaire spoke of the Bible as a short-lived book. He said that within a hundred years it would pass from common use. Not many people read Voltaire today, but his house has been packed with Bibles as a depot of a Bible society.
If you expect perfection from people your whole life is a series of disappointments, grumblings, and complaints.
Every time you open your mouth you let men look into your mind.
In the long run no individual prospers beyond the measure of his faith.
Get money – but stop once in a while to figure what it is costing you to get it. No man gets it without giving something in return. The wise man gives his labor and ability. The fool gives his life.
If you want to know if your brain is flabby, feel your legs.
We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.
There are no little things.
An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which company and which product shall be the leader today and which shall lead tomorrow.
The ablest men in all walks of modern life are men of faith. Most of them have much more faith than they themselves realize.
If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.
My program is to leave the fools to nature. She has diseases with which to deal with them.
Before you give up hope, turn back and read the attacks that were made on Lincoln.
It is said that great leaders are born, not made. The saying is true to this degree, that no man can persuade people to do what he wants them to do, unless he genuinely likes people, and believes that what he wants them to do is to their own advantage.
The American conception of advertising is to arouse desires and stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and by constant iteration to send them out to work harder to get the latest model-whether that model be an icebox or a rug or a new home.
I had never thought of advertising as a life work, though I had on the side, written some very successful copy.
A man may be down, but he is never out.
The Bible rose to the place it now occupies because it deserved to rise to that place, and not because God sent anybody with a box of tricks to prove its divine authority.
If there is no intelligence in the universe, then the universe has created something greater than itself-for it has created you and me.
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world.
Much brass has been sounded and many cymbals tinkled in the name of advertising; but the advertisements which persuade people to act are written by men who have an abiding respect for the intelligence of their readers, and a deep sincerity regarding the merits of the goods they have to sell.