“Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.”
“The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.”
“The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”
“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.”
“What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.”
“Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.”
“Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.”
“The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.”
“The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may thing what we like and say what we think.”
“The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.”
“A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.”
“Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.”
“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.”
“The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.”
“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.”
“The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.”
“The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.”
“To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.”
“Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.”
“People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ''consistent.''”
“A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.”
“Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”