The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement, or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.
Thou, oh my country, hast thy foolish ways, Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.
If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
rouble creates a capacity to handle it.
Nature, when she invented, manufactured and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.
The man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severely unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person.
Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!
Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
