“I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.”

Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.

The reward of a good deed is in having done it.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.

An ounce of performance is worth more than a pound of preachment.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Business is a fight, a continual struggle, just as life is.

Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.

Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

If it was woman who put man out of Paradise, it is still woman, and woman only, who can lead him back.

The man who has no problems is out of the game.

Failure — The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself.

We work to become, not to acquire.

If you want work well done, select a busy man – the other kind has no time.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.