The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives. |
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature |
The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own |
The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old. |
The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess Success. |
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That -- with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success -- is our national disease. |
The most general elements and workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with for his purposes. |
The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's. |
The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. |
The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. |
The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. |
The perfection of rottenness. |
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers |
The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, He can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean. |
The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality. |