26 quotes
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)