To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

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.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.

I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.

But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Have the courage to act instead of react.

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.

The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.

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.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

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.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.