Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?
In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.
There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.
I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.
The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference.
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.
This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.
In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.
As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.
If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.
The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.
We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
I consider time as an in immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.
A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.
The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure.
Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer.
One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.
The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.
When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.
Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that, if you let it alone, it will let you alone.
Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.
How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.
Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.