To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.
It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker.
Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.
The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.
You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do
Love is perfect kindness.
I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
Priapism is what happens when someone gets strangulated to the point of hypoxia.
I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
Tea is an affront to lunch and an insult to dinner.
Dance like nobody's looking.
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
All men are ignorant, just on different subjects.
A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.
If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
If you want love and abundance in your life, give it away.
There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.
It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.
The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Good wine needs no bush; a jug is the thing.
A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.
There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal that this race for profit.
No temperance society which is well officered and which has the real good of our fellow-men in view, will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall.
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess. Sometimes we are too close to the scene, to see clearly. We "know" ourselves so well that we cannot see how we are perceived by others. Our opinion of ourselves is only "one" opinion and it may not be the truth.
Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.
Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
I have often been asked, Do not people bore you? I do not understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always inopportune. I also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. They are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours; the hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.
I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.
Museums and art stores are also sources of pleasure and inspiration. Doubtless it will seem strange to many that the hand unaided by sight can feel action, sentiment, beauty in the cold marble; and yet it is true that I derive genuine pleasure from touching great works of art. As my finger tips trace line and curve, they discover the thought and emotion which the artist has portrayed.
Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.
Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.
The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.
The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny
You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
If you look toward the sunshine, you will never see the shadows.
What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else
I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.
