“After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.”

There is a wide difference between true courage and a mere contempt of life.

The public has more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

He who fears death has already lost the life he covets.

Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces.

Speech is the gift of all, but the thought of few.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Anger so clouds the mind that it cannot perceive the truth.

From lightest words sometimes the direst quarrel springs.

You should summon your overseer the next day, and should call for a report of what work has been done in good season and why it has not been possible to complete the rest, and what wine and corn and other crops have been gathered.

I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.

The hero saves us. Praise the hero! Now, who will save us from the hero?

Buy not what you want, but what you have need of; what you do not want is dear at a farthing.

Lighter is the wound foreseen.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

When you have observed how the field work has progressed, what things have been done, and what remains undone.

You must keep her on a tight rein.

Are one of the most beautiful monuments ever erected to science.

A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.

Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.

Audubon’s works are the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.