Walter Bagehot

“The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

“Life is a school of probability.”

“It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.”

“The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”

“The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. ”

“The soldier—that is, the great soldier—of to-day is not a romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic sentiment, full of fancies as to a love-lady or a sovereign; but a quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of Wellington was said to do, most of the shoes of his soldiers; despising all manner of èclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, ‘silent in seven languages’.”

“Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.”

“Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.”

“The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.”

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

“Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”