Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
To know is not less than to feel.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.
Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
If a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas and the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself acceptedin the competition of the market.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at the peril of being judged not to have lived.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight.
The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to ones self 'the work is done.' But just as one says that, the answer comes 'The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.' The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
Carve every word before you let it fall.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to be all one.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
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.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Men are tattooed 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.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what ourcountry has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
With all humility, I think, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.' Infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
All I mean by truth is what I can't help thinking.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.
The life of the law has not been logic it has been experience.
The law embodies the story of a nations development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
A page of history is worth a pound of logic.
The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God.
If we are only as the potters clay Made to be fashioned as the artist wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well.
Don't be 'consistent,' but be simply true.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories