"It is very lonely sometimes, trying to play God."

"Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise."

"It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen."

"The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person."

"It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure."

"The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."

"Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race."

"I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master."

"Systems die instincts remain."

"The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command."

"Old age is fifteen years older than I am."

"The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God."

"Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other."

"The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort."

"A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure."

"Pick my left pocket of its silver dime but spare the right-it holds my golden time!"

"Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads."

"Don't be consistent but be simply true."

"Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music."

"I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might ' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing."

"Apology - a desperate habit and one that is rarely cured."

"Love prefers twilight to daylight."

"An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years."

"The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God."

"If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old."

"A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say."

"I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late."

"Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so."

"When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax."

"A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles."

"Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else."

"The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion."

"Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us."

"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust."

"To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences."

"One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love."

"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions."

"Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth."

"If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing."

"Life is action and passion therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

"Imitation is a necessity of human nature."

"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."

"Rouble creates a capacity to handle it."

"I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them."

"Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children."

"Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!"

"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

"The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city."

"Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mother's secret hope outlives them all."

"A man must get a thing before he can forget it."