The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.
The process of nature cannot be evil.
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
What a lie it is to call this a free country, where none but the unworthy and undeserving may swear.
Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.
Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
To be busy is man's only happiness.
Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.
There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they're got one, and you beg for the core, and remind them how you give them a core one time, they take a mouth at you, and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't a-going to be no core.
Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.
When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Imagination labors best in distant fields.
If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.
The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.
It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience.
It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.
My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Great things can happen when you don't care who gets the credit.
Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
I said nothing of the sort.
The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
Let your joy be unconfined!
We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but anobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.
I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one.
I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.
I take happiness very seriously. It is a creed, a philosophy and an objective.
We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.
The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right.
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first
When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.
The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only-not from its privileged classes.
We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us
Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.
More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking.
Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.
Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
Happiness is a state of mind, and depends very little on outward circumstances.
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.
To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.
Instead of being satisfied to alleviate suffering, we shall labor hard and continually to prevent it.
World peace will never come until the passion of supremacy is combated.
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
