It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

May your home always be too small to hold all of your friends.

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.

Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.

A compliment is a statement of an agreeable truth; flattery is a statement of an agreeable untruth.

You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

. . . .When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them...

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.