... 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 »
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 »
We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truth ... unless we can trust to the human mind's having such a power... of guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the mother's womb holds us for ten months not in preparation for itself but for the region to which we seem to be discharg...ed when we are capable of drawing breath and surviving in the open, so in the span extending from infancy to old age we are ripening for another birth. Another beginning awaits us, another status. We cannot yet bear heaven's light except at intervals; look unfalteringly, then, to that decisive hour which is the body's last but not the soul's. All that lies about you look upon as the luggage in a posting station; you must push on. At your departure Nature strips you as bare as at your entry. You cannot carry out more than you brought in; indeed, you must lay down a good part of what you brought into life. The envelope of skin, which is your last covering, will be stripped off; the flesh and the blood which is diffused and courses through the whole of it will be stripped off; the bones and sinews which are the structural support of the shapeless and precarious mass will be stripped off. That day which you dread as the end is your birth into eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nat...ure of governments to tell lies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. ...War is not a sharpener of wits.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a person says, "I see a yellowish-orange after-image," he is saying something like this: "There is something going on which i...s like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »