There is no such thing as success in a bad business.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

Perfume; Any smell that is used to drown a worse one.

Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes.

Making men live in three worlds at once — past, present and future has been the chief harm organized religion has done.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell — joy consists in forgetting life.

A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

The weaknesses of the many make the leader possible—and the man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also. Discipleship is a degenerating process to all parties concerned. People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.