We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.