Bernard Quotes

Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.

The man who has never made a mistake will never make anything else.

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.

Modesty in women has two special advantages,--it enhances beauty and veils uncomeliness.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.

Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

It is the passions that do and undo everything.

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

I work as my father drank.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.

If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

Pride causes us to use our gifts as though they came from ourselves, not benefits received from God, and to usurp our benefactor's glory.

There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.

Brains are not everything.

I don't think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

There are three distinct comings of the Lord of which I know: His coming to men, His coming into men, and His coming against men.

Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.

People who do not speak our language very well do complain of feeling rebuffed by French people, who can sometimes be impatient, or even intolerant.

Have death always before your eyes as a salutary means of returning to God.

The truest interpretations are those with the best justification.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

[Those] who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations.

Death is but an instant, life a long torment.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

For it seems that long before the first enterprising man bent some twigs into a leaky roof, many animals were already accomplished builders.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.