“I soon found that wit, like every other power, has its boundaries; that its success depends upon the aptitude of others to receive impressions; and that as some bodies, indissoluble by heat, can set the furnace and crucible at defiance, there are min”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 102 of 303
“I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.”
“In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.”
“It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.”
“Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.”
“Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.”
“Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside.”
“I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated.”
“We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.”
“Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.”
“I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.”
“They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.”
“Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.”
“Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”
“If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn’t go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son.”
“We cannot wish for that we know not.”
“Consider data without prejudice.”
“If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.”
“Thou oughtest to be nice, even to Superstition, in keeping thy Promises; and therefore thou shouldst be equally cautious in making them.”
“The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.”