💬 Quotes

"A soldier fights for his pay, his regiment, and his flag, but the true soldier fights because he loves his country and understands the value of the institutions he is defending."

"If forced to choose between the penitentiary and a white house for four years, I would prefer the penitentiary, where the food and lodging are better and the accountability is less."

"A house should be born of the land and sit on the land, being so related to the hill that the hill and the house could not exist without each other."

"Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines."

"Early in life I had to choose between honest hypocrisy and hypocritical honesty. I chose the former and am now sometimes at a loss to know which is which."

"Architecture is that great living spirit which, taking the best from nature's material, infinite and exhaustible, does keep buildings ever in harmony with the earth."

"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."

"A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be but little the better for anything else."

"The great mistake I have observed in people's breeding their children has been, that this has not been taken care enough of in its due season; that the mind has not been made obedient to discipline, and pliant to reason, when it was most tender, most easy to be bowed."

"Thus children may be cozened into a knowledge of the letters; be taught to read, without perceiving it to be anything but a sport, and play themselves into that which others are whipped for."

"Instead of alluring them with the hopes of toys and fruit, let them have commendation, if they do well; let them also be made sensible of the disgrace of having done amiss."

"Reading and writing and learning I ordinarily call learning, but if you will take it in the sense truly meant by books, that is, to teach him to read well, and understand what he reads, I only say that it is a small and inconsiderable part of education."

"Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it."

"He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry."

"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

"It was the voyage of the Snark that I had set my heart upon. And when I set my heart upon a thing, I am apt to go through with it."

"Before I was out of my teens I had made up my mind that the only way to be happy was to take chances, to 'up anchor' and let drive."

"Man is so naturally indolent that if left to himself he would sink back into the primeval slime. It requires a tremendous wrench to get him out of his ruts."

"It is better to sail and sink than to rot at the dock."