Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
All women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.
A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
