To return to the Epigram Guide Webpage.No good sensible working bee listens to the bedbug on the subject of business.
Hike for respectablity, and cuddle safely under her Paisley, and it's you for a Mollycoddle. Get weaned - in God's name, get weaned!
Education is simply the encouragement of right habits - the fixing of good habits until they become a part of one's nature, and are exercised automatically.
Forms change, but nothing dies. Everything is in circulation. Men, as well as planets, have their orbits. Some have a wider swing than others, but just wait and they will come back.
Helpful men are safe men.
Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.
No great spiritual event befalls those who do not summon it.
Reversing your treatment of the man you have wronged is better than asking his forgiveness.
If you wish to lessen the worries of the world and scatter sunshine as you go, don't bother to go a-slumming, or lift the fallen, or trouble to reclaim the erring - simply pay your debts cheerfully and promptly. It lubricates the wheels of trade, breaks up party ice, and gives tone to the social system and liberates good-will.
Men who have ideas and express them are yet at bay in the world.
When your wife and your affinity are the same person, society has no rope on your foot.
Do not stand under an umbrella when God rains humor.
The Grove Park Inn could never be complete in its fulfillment of purpose without the assistance of the Roycrofters.
Work your grief into art and it is gone.
Educational systems are designed for average intellects.
Heaven is largely a matter of digestion, and come to think of it digestion is mostly a matter of mind.
Life is a sequence and the man who does great work has long been in training for it.
While five o'clock tea may not work, eleven o'clock beer is a roaring success.
There are only two classes of men who live in history: those who crowd a thing to its extreme limit, and those who then arise and cry, "Hold!"
Life is a compromise between fate and free will.
If you suffer, thank God! - it is a sure sign that you are alive.
As for myself I'd rather be a good honest wild ass of the desert with long, fuzzy ears, than a poor, imitation bird-of-paradise, stuffed by one hundred and seventeen geniuses.
I belong to that happy Elect Few who have succeeded in ridding themselves of the friendship of the many.
Epigrams from January '96 are available here.
To return to the Epigram Guide Webpage.