William Mathews Quotations

As with the acquisition, so with the use of money; they way in which a man spends it is often one of the surest tests of character.

So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man's mouth, and a wooden one into another's, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star.

No man ever sailed over exactly the same route that another sailed over before him; every man who starts on the ocean of life arches his sails to an untried breeze.

What a man does is the real test of what a man is.

In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.

It cannot be too often repeated that it is not helps, but obstacles, not facilities, but difficulties that make men.

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!

Proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.

The most discouraging feature of the mania for book-collecting is, that it grows by what it feeds on, and becomes the more insatiable the more it is gratified.

All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth