There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

At some point, you will hit a plateau. If you keep doing same things you did to get to that point, make a change.

They'll get my Kindle when they pry it from my cold dead hands, if my corpse will release it.

The secret of a happy home is that members of the family learn to give and receive love.

Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The injuries that befall us unexpectedly are less severe than those which are deliberately anticipated.

The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.

The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

The very purpose of a bill of rights is to withdraw certain subjects from...political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities.

We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.