we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Unless the vessel is pure, everything which is poured into it will turn sour.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

Dare to begin! He who postpones living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

No poem was ever written by a drinker of water.

Better to accept whatever happens.

There are lessons to be learned from a stupid man.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

We are optimists until we are not.

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.

Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

If the misery of the poor is caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.