| |
| A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience. | 1 |
| All men are bores except when we want them. | 2 |
| An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not differ sensibly from a straight line. | 3 |
| Children of wealth or want, to each is given / One spot of green, and all the blue of heaven. | 4 |
| Don’t be “consistent,” but be simply true. | 5 |
| Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there’s nothing like wet weather for transplanting. | 6 |
| Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him. | 7 |
| Every real master of speaking or writing uses his personality as he would any other serviceable material. | 8 |
| Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all. | 9 |
| Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favour of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief, of large ones. | 10 |
| Faith loves to lean on Time’s destroying arm. | 11 |
| Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else; very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to now, let us be a celebrated individual.” | 12 |
| Genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem. | 13 |
| Genius is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. | 14 |
| Genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train. | 15 |
| Good-breeding is surface Christianity. | 16 |
| He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor. | 17 |
| How many men live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made! | 18 |
| Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. | 19 |
| Knowledge and timber should not be much used until they are seasoned. | 20 |
| |
|
|
| |
| 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. | 21 |
| Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes upon soundings. | 22 |
| Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. | 23 |
| Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold. | 24 |
| Love prefers twilight to daylight. | 25 |
| Men are tatooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes. | 26 |
| Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. | 27 |
| Observation may trip now and then without throwing you, for her gait is a walk; but inference always gallops, and if she stumbles, you are gone. | 28 |
| Old books, as you well know, are books of the world’s youth, and new books are fruits of its age. | 29 |
| Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of the resurrection. | 30 |
| People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism. | 31 |
| People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent. | 32 |
| Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest white light of truth. | 33 |
| Poets are never young in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience. | 34 |
| Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber if he has common-sense on the ground-floor. But if a man has not got plenty of good common-sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient. | 35 |
| Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes. | 36 |
| Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. | 37 |
| Some books are edifices to stand as they are built; some are hewn stones ready to form a part of future edifices; some are quarries from which stones are to be split for shaping and after use. | 38 |
| Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can’t sit still, or at least they must work their limbs or features. | 39 |
| Talking is one of the fine arts. | 40 |
| The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city. | 41 |
| The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins. | 42 |
| The brain-women never interest us like the heart-women; white roses please less than red. | 43 |
| The poet’s delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. | 44 |
| The riotous tumult of a laugh is the mob-law of the features, and propriety the magistrate who reads the Riot Act. | 45 |
| The sea belongs to eternity, and not time, and of that it sings its monotonous song for ever and ever. | 46 |
| The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer. | 47 |
| The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance. | 48 |
| The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like a lamb. | 49 |
| The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. | 50 |
| There is nothing like the cold dead hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism, and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race. | 51 |
| They govern the world, these sweet-lipped women, because beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom. | 52 |
| To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. | 53 |
| 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. Does not Mr. Bryant say that Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? | 54 |
| We don’t always care most for those flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium. | 55 |
| What a blessed thing it is that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! | 56 |
| Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from; and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and colour of its birthplace. | 57 |
| Wit strews a single ray (of the prism) separated from the rest upon an object; never white light, that is the province of wisdom. | 58 |
| Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; a mother’s secret hope outlives them all! | 59 |
| |
