Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.
Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.
If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.
Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.
He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.
A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.
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