American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three hardly possible.
One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie thats a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Intimates are predestined.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
Friends are born, not made.
A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.
What one knows is in youth of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache orrheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
