When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.