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 not to have lived.
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The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.
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A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
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I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
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Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
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The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
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Age, like distance lends a double charm.
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To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
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A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.
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Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.
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Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.
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Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
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Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
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Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.
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The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
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The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
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Speak not too well of one who scarce will know himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
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Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
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Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.
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A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
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Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
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Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
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People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.
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Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
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... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.
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Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
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And when you stick on conversation's burrs, don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
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In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
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Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
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Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
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A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
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The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
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A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
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What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.
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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
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What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
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Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
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Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
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All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.
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The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
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It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
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Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
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The Amen of nature is always a flower.
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The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.
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Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
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Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
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A page of history is worth a pound of logic.
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Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
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People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?
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Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
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A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.
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Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
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Man's mind, stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
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A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
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A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
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A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
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A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
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The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
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Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.
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Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
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Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
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This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.
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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 peril of being judged not to have lived.
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To live is to function. That is all there is in living.
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It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.
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It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God.
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Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
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Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
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I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
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I firmly believe that if the whole material medical could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the sea.
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Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
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Our brains our seventy year clocks, the angel of life winds them up once and for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection.
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Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
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People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
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A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
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Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
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Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
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You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
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Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
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The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.
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People who 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.
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How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
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Love prefers twilight to daylight.
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Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
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Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
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Young men know the rules, but old men know the exceptions.
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Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
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And Silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.
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Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
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God's plan made a hopeful beginning. But man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end in God's glory. But, at present, the other side's winning.
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Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
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A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
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The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
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Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
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The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
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Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
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Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
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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.
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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.
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The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
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The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
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If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say: meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it, and had better be on speaking terms with it.
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Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
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A new untruth is better than an old truth.
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Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
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Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
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Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
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The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
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Man has will, but woman has her way.
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It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
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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 the time in which it is used.
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Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
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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.
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The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
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Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
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