In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.
If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do comparatively little harm. No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he suffers more acutely than the fox at the death. Remember that even in childbeating there is the sportsman's way and the cad's way.
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.
Economy is the art of making the most of life.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
The love of fairplay is a spectator's virtue, not a principal's.
Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.
If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.
We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.