“The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.”
“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
“It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.”
“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”
“The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.”
“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.”
“It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.”
“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”
“The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.”
“Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
“Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.”
“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
“Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.”
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
“Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.”
“The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.”
“The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.”
“The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.”
“There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.”
“Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.”
“Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.”
“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”
“The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”
“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”