Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.
Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.
In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.
As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.
There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
You can see exile as loss, and then it will be a loss for you. You can treat it as opportunity and then all kinds of benefits accrue.
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare.
Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.
The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.
Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.
Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.
True religion and virtue give a cheerful and happy turn to the mind, admit of all true pleasures, and even procure for us the highest.
It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.
The first race of mankind used to dispute, as our ordinary people do now-a-days, in a kind of wild logic, uncultivated by rule of art.
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
Americas presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation.
The end of being is to know; and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,-why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?
The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.
The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.
That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.
Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?
There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.
One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.
The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.
If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.
There is no passion that is not finely expressed in those parts of the inspired writings which are proper for divine songs and anthems.
There is not on earth a spectacle more worthy the regard of a Creator intent on his works, than a brave man superior to his sufferings.
The schoolboy counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married.
The statue lies hid in a block of marble; and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter, and removes the rubbish.
The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
America's presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.
I think what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.