Great Throughts Treasury

"The ultimate test of the laughing instinct is that a man should always be ready to laugh at himself."

"There is no means by which men so powerfully elude their ignorance, disguise it from themselves and from others as by words."

"Many earnest persons, who have found direct education for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare that they first began to learn when they began to teach, and that in education of others they discovered the secret of their own."

"Thinking is the process that I hold in horror. I have thought for fifty years, with the most ghastly and disastrous results, mostly thoughts of my own, and if I attempt to superpose the thoughts of other people, I find my mental equipment utterly inadequate to the strain."

"In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are."

"The best translation is not that which is most like the original but which is the most different from it."