Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
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.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
Don't be 'consistent', but be simply true.
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else - very rarely to those who say to themselves, 'Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!'.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
