“If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.”

The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men.

Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil.

With hat in hand, one gets on in the world.

The world is the same everywhere.

Discontent is the source of all trouble,but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.

We consider it tedious to talk of the weather, and yet there is nothing more important.

Being alone when one’s belief is firm, is not to be alone.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

Years teach us more than books.

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

If you sound great in the practice room, you’re practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning … for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.

It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals.

You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously.

We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,–just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all.

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

We could almost say that being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms. So acknowledging foolishness is always a very important and powerful experience. The phenomenal world can be perceived and seen properly if we see it from the perspective of being a fool.

Perhaps there is no position more perilous to a man’s honesty thanthat?of knowing himselftobe quiteloved by a girl whom he almost loves himself.