Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George's, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Genius.. Has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble.. It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains.
trouble
When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!
reading
Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful.
choice
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
progress
As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another.
rules philosophy
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
rights places
How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.
wonder wonders
They are like persons met upon a journey; I think them very agreeable at first but soon find, as a rule, that I am tired of them.
rules
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.
silence
By a merciful dispensation of Providence university training is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on demonstration.
majority
Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.
growth
I am not sure that I do not begin to like the correction of a mistake, even when it involves my having shown much ignorance and stupidity, as well as I like hitting on a new idea.
mistakes
Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides.
crime fitness
The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally, and that, if possible, he should get the reputation of being well-to-do in the world.
reputation
numbers
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