He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.