Apothegms are the wisdom of the past condensed for the instruction and guidance of the present. – Tryon Edwards
The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others. – Tryon Edwards
Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another – too often ending in the loss of both. – Tryon Edwards
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it… – George Santayana, “Chapter VIII: Prerational Morality,” The Life of Reason: Volu
People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. – Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, 2012
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Henry David Thoreau