“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.”

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

Children need models rather than critics.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Space is the stature of God.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

To teach is to learn twice.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Personality begins where comparison ends.

One that has never previously been seen before our time, in any age since the beginning of the world.

The beginning, middle, and end of the birth, growth, and perfection of whatever we behold is from contraries, by contraries, and to contraries; and whatever contrariety is, there is action and reaction, there is motion, diversity, multitude, and order, there are degrees, succession and vicissitude.

There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.

Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility.

Maybe it’s true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.