The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.
We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.
While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.
Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.
Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.
The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.
History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.
the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring - or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps - lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.
History is not written in the interests of morality.
Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation.
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.
Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.
It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.
A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
Friendship takes time.
We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.
Wit is a thing capable of proof.
Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. ... under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
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