Show me a genuine case of platonic friendship, and I shall show you two old or homely faces.
The smaller the head, the bigger the dream.
God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it.
The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.
In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.
A hole is nothing at all, but you can break your neck in it.
When walking through the 'valley of shadows,' remember, a shadow is cast by a Light.
Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.
Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.
Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye.
Practical prayer is harder on the soles of your shoes than on the knees of your trousers.
An Englishmen thinks seated; a Frenchmen standing; an American pacing, an Irishman, afterwards.
The statesman shears the sheep; the politician skins them.
If you keep your mouth shut you will never put your foot in it.
Before you beat a child, be sure yourself are not the cause of the offense.
When you are dealing with a child, keep all your wits about you, and sit on the floor.
A home-made friend wears longer than one you buy in the market.
A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.
Sorrow, like rain makes roses and mud.
An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.
You cannot build up a character in a solitude; you need a formed character to stand a solitude.
Childhood has no necessary connection with age.
That a mouse of scandal whisks its foolish tail across the church's floor is not sufficient cause for clamorous leaping out of its windows.
There are ten church-members by inheritance for one by conviction.
The most dangerous savages live in cities.
Nations die first in the big cities.
The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.
You are not obliged to put on evening clothes to meet God.
The fear we throw about danger is always as disproportionate as a paternal shirt on an infant.
Every April God rewrites the book of Genesis.
If you keep your eyes so fixed on heaven that you never look at the earth, you will stumble into hell.
A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.
The perjurer's mother told white lies.
The hardest fact in the world to accept is the inevitable mixture of evil with good in all things.
It is as easy to give advice to yourself as to others, and as useless.
Some men, like a wet dog, sprinkle a shower of advice over you when you are least prepared for a bath.
If you snub Conscience a few times she will cut your acquaintance.
Each man's soul is a menagerie where Conscience, the animal-tamer, lives with a collection of wild beasts.
The perfect critic is one ... that sees with the eyes of posterity.
Man and the earth move in orbits: what they did before, they will do again.
Happiness and unhappiness differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one pressed in tin ... Each carries the same water.
You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.
The collision of a great man with a great idea strikes fire in dry flax.
We must be laid like a brand in the fire ... if we would gain immortal youth.
A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound.
Justice and the facade of a temple are seen best from the outside.
Law is the rudder of the ship of state.
Gold is so heavy it settles down upon the lowest souls.
Friends made fast seldom remain fast.
If all fools wore white hoods, any crowd would look like a field of blooming buckwheat.
Cunning is a short blanket--if you pull it over your face, you expose your feet.
If you are ignorant enough, you can walk like a cat on the slippery roof-ridge of danger.
And death, that sits in marble silence cold, Will furnish hope to those who may behold The meaning in the everlasting change Of all that dies, returning, wondrous strange.
The Devil is not afraid to sit on an altar.
If you scratch some saints you will find the devil.
If the devil went about doing a tenth of what he is accused of doing he would be poor from paying the blacksmith for ox-shoes for his hooves.
Envy is a gun with a faulty breech-lock which flares back and burns the gunner.
We smile at the women who are eagerly following the fashions in dress whilst we are as eagerly following the fashions in thought.
Laws are made by the old, exceptions by the young.
The three most important events of human life are equally devoid of reason: birth, marriage and death.
Marriage is commonly a meal wherein the soup is better than the desert.
The bigger the dam of patience, the worse the flood when the dam breaks.
Patience is the analogue of God's serenity.
Patience has tender feet.
Ordinarily when a man in difficulty turns to prayer, he has already tried every other means of escape.
Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.
Despair is vinegar from the wine of hope.
Public opinion is the pennant on a nation's mast which shows the politician and the editor how to trim the sails.
The fact that you have been knocked down is interesting, but the length of time you remained down is important.
Exclusiveness is a characteristic of recent riches, high society, and the skunk.
A drunkard is like a whiskey-bottle, all neck and belly and no head.
Autumn is a hint from God to Old Age.
Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.
Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.
Some liars are so expert they deceive themselves.
A worship of truth can be idolatry if the truth is small enough.
Human truth is always soiled with falsehood.
Treat kindly every miserable truth that knocks begging at your door, otherwise you will some day fail to recognize Truth Himself when He comes in rags.
Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.
There is more in the education of children than the everlasting iteration of the word "don't!"
It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie....
It is a mean thief or a successful author that plunders the dead.
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
A youth's knowledge is like a cheap shotgun-likely to do as much damage to the owner as to the game.
A habit of debt is very injurious to the memory.
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.
The milk of human kindness should be brought fresh to the table every morning.
A politician is like quicksilver: if you try to put your finger on him, you find nothing under it.
If you have forgotten how to be a child you cannot teach children.
Knowledge is flour, but wisdom is bread.
Wisdom grows in quiet places.
That art is best which suggests most.
There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.
No man can have a reasonable opinion of women until he has long lost interest in hair-restorers.
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
Humor wades across a brook, wit jumps over it.
Wisdom is also a deeper consciousness of ignorance.
Those that say they despise riches are saints or liars.
Wealth is a tide which flows into one place by ebbing from another.
