In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hard, and there is no knowledge that is not power.
Revenge...is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.
The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.
Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup.
When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.
A bird in the hand is safer thantwo overhead. All courageous animals are carnivorous, and greater courage is to be expected in a people, such as the English, whose food is strong and hearty, than in the half starved commonalty of other countries.
Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.
All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.
And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.
No rock so hard but a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.
He never sold the truth to serve the hour, Nor paltered with Eternal God for power.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, these three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
Two aged men, that had been foes for life, Met by a grave, and wept - and in those tears They washed away the memory of their strife; Then wept again the loss of all those years.
I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example of himself.
I know what love is. It?s understanding. It?s you and me and let the rest of the world go by. Just the two of us living our lives together happily and proudly. No self-torture and no doubt. It?s enduring and it?s everlasting. Nothing can change it. Nothing can change us, Ollie. That?s what I think love is.
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business.
The thrush in my back yard sings down his nose in liquid runs of melody, over and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his own pleasure. It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot believe that he issimply saying "thrush here."
The chambers in the house of dreams Are fed with so divine an air, That Time's hoary wings grow young therein, And they who walk there are most fair.
Nothing begins, and nothing ends, that is not paid with moan; for we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.
Let us have Wine and Women, Mirth and Laughter; Sermons and soda-water the day after.
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far moreglorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.