... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it. |
[I]t is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists through blind imitation of the past. |
A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them! |
A good and true woman is said to resemble a Cremona fiddle: age but increases its worth and sweetens its tone |
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color |
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend |
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. |
A man may fulfil the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. |
A man must get a thing before he can forget it |
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp. |
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. |
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. |
A new untruth is better than an old truth. |
A page of history is worth a pound of logic. |
A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time. |