A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Common sense is the very antipodes of science.

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

People all over the nation are starved for honesty and common sense.

Look at the stars and not down at your own feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

One beautiful heart is better than a thousand beautiful faces.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined or the insect, as well for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you do or as fast. There is a time when you didn't know what you know today.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.