WednesdayMay 20, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Theres many a good tune played on an old fiddle.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
An apology for the Devil: It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
... There can be no doubt about faith and not reason being the ultima ratio. Even Euclid, who has laid himself as little open to the charge of credulity as any writer who ever lived, cannot get beyond this. He has no demonstrable first premise. He requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration, and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure indeed is demonstration, but his ground his faith. Nor again can he get further than telling a man he is a fool if he persists in differing from him. He says 'which is absurd,' and declines to discuss the matter further. Faith and authority, therefore, prove to be as necessary for him as for anyone else.
Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way.
Genius is a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble.
[Genius] is no respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things around which human affairs turn most persistently.
I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.
There are two great rules in life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less of an exception to the general rule.
The hen is an egg's way of producing another egg.
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
The most perfect humor and irony is generally quite unconscious.
Independence is essential for permanent but fatal to immediate success.
Some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
To live is like to love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo, not for a man.
Logic is like the sword those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
It is better to have loved and lost than to never have lost at all.
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to market it.
There is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
It costs a lot of money to die comfortably.
Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
The New Jerusalem, when it comes, will probably be found so far to resemble the old as to stone its prophets freely.
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
It hath been said that an unjust peace is to be preferred before a just war.
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
All animals but men know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow it.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
When the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
'Man wants but little here below' but likes that little goodand not too long in coming.
Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can it be gotten without it. Gold, or the value of whats equivalent to gold, lies at the root of wisdom, and enters so largely into the very essence of the Holy Ghost that no gold, no Holy Ghost may pass as an axiom.
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Youth is like spring, an overpraised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
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