“That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”

Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.

Books, the children of the brain.

Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.

It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.

You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.

What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.

You start pretending to have fun, you might have a little by accident.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.

I’m just a careful person around wheels and stuff like that. I try to be as cautious as I can, cause I lost friends to motorcycle accidents and car accidents. So I don’t ever play around anything like that.

I was hit by a car once on my bike, but I still rode home.

You don’t just accidentally show up in the World Series.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws. What persona are you hiding behind?