Success provides more opportunities to say things than the number of things a pundit has worth saying.
Success is overrated. Incompetence is what we should revere it marks us off from animals.
In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.
Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one?s decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one?s own true gifts. It involves thinking about one?s environment and deciding what one will and won?t accept.
Family lore can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it on for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.
Each generation?s job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation?s system of values for a new age.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.
Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.
He whom the gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound.
In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.
There's no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it's only a question of comparative badness, brother.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Speed is good only when wisdom leads the way. The end of this journey, whether to the high horizons of hope or the depths of destruction, will be determined by the collective wisdom of the people who live on this shrinking planet.
No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut.
There are three ways a man can be ruined: women,gambling, and farming. My father chose the most boring.
Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but impairs what it would improve
But blind to former as to future fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state?
'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.
But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit.
Love, free as air at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.
To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake.
You purchase pain with all that joy can give, and die of nothing but a rage to live.
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring it out.