The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Men hate more steadily than they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

A man is related to all nature.

Sometimes God dillies and dallies, and sometimes he just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.

Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Romance is the fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of things as they are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination.

The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.

Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure;...

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander

A witty saying proves nothing.

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.

When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

Do something every day that you don't want to do this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

I have gained this by philosophy that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.