For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. 

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Truth is our element.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours. 

“I’d sooner be called a successful crook than a destitute monarch.

“Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

“I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.”

“In the light of our egos, we are all dethroned monarchs.”

“Why should poetry have to make sense?

“Patriotism is too deep a feeling to depict in the posing for a photograph.”