Great Throughts Treasury

"Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction."

""I wonder when in the world you're going to do anything, Rudolf?" said my brother's wife."

"'Bourgeois,' I observed, 'is an epithet which the riff-raff apply to what is respectable, and the aristocracy to what is decent'."

"A book might be written on the injustice of the just."

"Economy is going without something you do want in case you should, someday, want something you probably won't want."

"Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls."

"He is very fond of making things which he does not want, and then giving them to people who have no use for them."

"I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation."

"His foe was folly and his weapon wit."

"I may not understand, but I am willing to admire."

"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."

"In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction."