Wise Phrases

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best. Of this stamp is the cant of not man, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

To those who have exhausted statecraft, nothing remains but the realm of pure thought.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Why, I say, that to tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection; it is plunder, and I entirely disclaim it; but I ask you to protect the rights and interests of labour generally in the first place, by allowing no free imports from countries which meet you with countervailing duties; and, in the second place, with respect to agricultural produce, to compensate the soil for the burdens from which other classes are free by an equivalent duty. This is my view of what is called "protection."

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

One of the principal reasons that diverts those who are entering upon this knowledge so much from the true path which they should follow, is the fancy that they take at the outset that good things are inaccessible, giving them the name great, lofty, elevated, sublime. This destroys everything. I would call them low, common, familiar: these names suit it better; I hate such inflated expressions.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

For meditation is, I presume, that act of the mind by which it seeks within, either the law of the phenomena which it has contemplated without, or semblances, symbols, and analogies corresponsive to the same.