A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Few things are brought to a sucessful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought.
To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.
We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.
God help the man who won't marry until he finds a perfect woman, and God help him still more if he finds her.
Few ever lived to a great age, and fewer still ever became distinguished, who were not in the habit of early rising.
The road goes ever on and on down fromthe door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone and I must follow if I can. Pursuing it with weary feet until it joins some larger way, where many paths and errands meet -and whither then, I cannot say.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
Study what thou art Whereof thou art a part What thou knowest of this art This is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within.
There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who prosper by the old order.
Laws are essential emanations from the self-poised character of God; they radiate from the sun to the circling edge of creation. Verily, the mighty Lawgiver hath subjected himself unto laws.
Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.
There has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else
The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.