'I stumbled over the roots of the tree which I planted.' It must have been an old forester who said that.
Does the sparrow know how the stork feels?
Lamps make oil spots, and candles want snuffing; it is only the light of heaven that shines pure and leaves no stain.
If you miss the first button-hole, you will not succeed in buttoning up your coat.
A burnt child dreads the fire; an old man who has often been singed is afraid of warming himself.
It is not worth while to do anything for the world that we have with us, as the existing order may in a moment pass away. It is for the past and the future that we must work: for the past, to acknowledge its merits; for the future, to try to increase its value.
Let no one think that people have waited for him as for the Savior.
Character in matters great and small consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.
Can a nation become ripe? That is a strange question. I would answer, Yes! if all the men could be born thirty years of age. But as youth will always be too forward and old age too backward, the really mature man is always hemmed in between them, and has to resort to strange devices to make his way through.
The most important matters of feeling as of reason, of experience as of reflection, should be treated of only by word of mouth. The spoken word at once dies if it is not kept alive by some other word following on it and suited to the hearer. Observe what happens in social converse. If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation. With the written word the case is still worse. No one cares to read anything to which he is not already to some extent accustomed; he demands the known and the familiar under an altered form. Still, the written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.