Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.
No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.
Learn to foster an ardent imagination; so shall you descry beauty which others passed unheeded.
I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.
No great man is ever born too soon or too late.
People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.
There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.
Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.
A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves.
The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.
There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.
The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.
It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
The families of our friends are always a disappointment.
The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.
Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility.
The older I get,” observed Mr. van Koppen, “the more I realize that everything depends upon what a man postulates. The rest is plain sailing.
Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious to do something which he considers useful.