To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
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.
An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: 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 person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
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.
Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.
Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Most persons have died before they expired - died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.
When in doubt do it.
The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.
Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.
Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.
A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.
So long as the body is affected through the mind no audacious device even of the most manifestly dishonest character can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield to it an implicit or even a partial faith.
I should like to see any kind of a man distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are but in what direction we are moving.
A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.
