A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.
Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind.
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called ‘facts.’ They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself.
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
God reigneth. All is well.
He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself.
How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!
If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop him.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves that necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
One's breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.
The brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest.
The great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and according to law.
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men—from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.
When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.