True patriotism is a charity so wide that it covers a nation.

A government is the complexion of the people--healthy as they are healthy, diseased as they are diseased.

A rose gets its color and fragrance from the root, and man his virtue from his childhood.

Each man's soul is a menagerie where Conscience, the animal-tamer, lives with a collection of wild beasts.

Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

The public is a deaf cyclops, and it sees only one thing at a time.

Nations die first in the big cities.

Friendship extends about four city blocks.

Childhood has no necessary connection with age.

We use religion like a trolley-car--we ride on it only while it is going our way.

The real difference between men is not sanity and insantiy, but more or less insanity.

The best historian lies like a mirror.

When the heart is crowded, it has most room; when empty, it can find place for no new guest.

Friends made fast seldom remain fast.

Character, like wine or cold tea in a bottle, takes its shape from the environment.

You cannot gather much truth by searching the fields; you must sink shafts.

Most of our virtues are gouty from lack of exercise.

The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

Gold is so heavy it settles down upon the lowest souls.

Charity is the note that resolves the discord.

There is more in the education of children than the everlasting iteration of the word "don't!"

Marriage is commonly a meal wherein the soup is better than the desert.

Delay is a bitter tonic, but it increases appetite.

Grief chants, or, if violent or sudden, its utterance is exactly like that of physical pain.

Life is being, not having.

If you have forgotten how to be a child you cannot teach children.

No man can have a reasonable opinion of women until he has long lost interest in hair-restorers.

Secrecy, like oil on the body of a wrestler, makes an opponent slippery.

The fear we throw about danger is always as disproportionate as a paternal shirt on an infant.

Success covers a multitude of sins.

Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself.

Well begun is not only half done, but often fully cooked.

The hardest fact in the world to accept is the inevitable mixture of evil with good in all things.

Faith is a pair of spectacles fitted by God in a dispensary for the poor, whereby the near-sighted can see truth at a distance, and get rid of pain from eye-strain.

Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.

Reason is the miner's lamp used in bringing up ore from the mind.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than the basement.

Envy is a gun with a faulty breech-lock which flares back and burns the gunner.

The milk of human kindness should be brought fresh to the table every morning.

Practical prayer is harder on the soles of your shoes than on the knees of your trousers.

Hope and milk sour by standing.

Human truth is always soiled with falsehood.

A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound.

You can often love your neighbor as yourself more effectively across a high fence.

A true friend, with an annual oiling, will run a lifetime, like a good watch.

Those that think it permissible to tell a white lie soon grow color-blind.

Wisdom grows in quiet places.

Despair is vinegar from the wine of hope.

You can swim in life and seawater, but both are hard to swallow.

Your heart is not a houseplant: if you never set it out in the sun and rain, it will wither.

The soul's vitality after death is proportionate to its vitality before death.

Suspicion is an owl that flies when the light is bad and catches only vermin for food.

Justice without charity is at best a dutiful stepmother.

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