1. "A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."
2. ”A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.”
3. “A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.”
4. “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”
5. “Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”
6. “Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.”
7. “Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.”
8. “Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
9. “Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts.”
10. ”If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”
11. ”I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”
12. “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
13. “I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.”
14. “I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
15. ”I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension of the following arithmetical formula: 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a + b = c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.”
16. ”Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.”
17. “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.”
18. “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.”
19. “Literature is full of coincidences, which some love to believe are plagiarisms. There are thoughts always abroad in the air which it takes more wit to avoid than to hit upon.”
20. "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
21. “Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”
22. “Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”
23. "Never take away hope from any human being."
24. “Nothing can be so perfect when we possess it as it will seem when remembered.”
25. “Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!”
26. “Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.”
27. “[Science is] piecemeal revelation.”
28. “Shock, hurt, and anger are not consequences to be weighed lightly. No member of the community with a decent respect for others should use, or encourage others to use, slurs and epithets intended to discredit another's race, ethnic group, religion, or sex. [Yet] it may sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free expression.”
29. “Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.”
30. ”Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.”
31. “The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.”
32. “The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.”
33. “The character of every act depends on the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”
34. “The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.”
35. “The individual will always be a minority. If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.”
36. “The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.”
37. “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.”
38. “The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.”
39. “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”
40. “This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.”
41. ”To be seventy years young is sometimes for more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”
42. “To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.”
43. “To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.”
44. ”Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.”
45. “When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”
46. “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
