... overconfidence in one's own ability is the root of much evil. Vanity, egoism, is the deadliest of all characteristics. This va...nity, combined with extreme ignorance of conditions the knowledge of which is the very A B C of business and of life, produces more shipwrecks and heartaches than any other part of our mental make-up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country [Virginia] will have my political creed in the form of a "Declaration &c." which I wa...s lately directed to draw. This will give decisive proof that my own sentiment concurred with the vote they instructed us to give.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continenta...l poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The A B C of being, The ruddy temper, the hammer... Of red and blue, the hard sound Steel against intimation the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read,... he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling (as if to signify the pine's value to him), puts up a deestrict schoolhouse, and introduces Webster's spelling book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and mak...es it hard for it to free itself from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a... livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowl...y but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, ...even a man, only no longer make me me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a l...arge assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »