Quote collection
820 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world."
"Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles."
"A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man."
"The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant."
"The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything"
"All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone."
"There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done."
"Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine."
"Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given."
"Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by."
"If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?"
"This is the eternal law of Nature for a man, my beneficent Exeter-Hall friends; this, that he shall be permitted, encouraged, and if need be, compelled to do what work the Maker of him has intended by the making of him for this world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that."
"The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever."
"If you are looking at data over and over you better be taking away valuable insight every time. If you are constantly looking at data that isn't leading to strategic action stop wasting your time and look for more Actionable Analytics."
"Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules."
"A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress."
"He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever."
"The goal of yesterday will be our starting-point to-morrow."
"Tobacco smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; and at all events to hold his peace and take to his pipe again the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any."
"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance."