He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!