John Sterling Quotes

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.

You just cant predict baseball

Compliments are only lies in court clothes.

Be busy in trading, receiving, and giving, for life is too good to be wasted in living.

Knowledge, or more expressively truth,--for knowledge is truth received into our intelligence,--truth is an ideal whole.

Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness.

One dupe is as impossible as one twin.

A man without earnestness is a mournful and perplexing spectacle. But it is a consolation to believe, as we must of such a one, that he is the most effectual and compulsive of all schools.

Superstition moulds nature into an arbitrary semblance of the supernatural, and then bows down to the work of its own hands.

Every man's follies are the caricature resemblances of his wisdom.

Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrist.

Enthusiasm is grave, inward, self-controlled; mere excitement, outward, fantastic, hysterical, and passing in a moment from tears to laughter.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape, to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation--the realization of an idea by an act of the will.

I could honor Carmen Electra. I think she's beautiful.

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

There is no lie that a man will not believe; and there is no man who does not believe many lies; and there is no man who believes only lies.

Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.

Speech is as a pump, by which we raise and pour out the water from the great lake of Thought,--whither it flows back again.

Commerce has made all winds her mistress.

The ideal client is the very wealthy man in very great trouble.

Repentance clothes in grass and flowers the grave in which the past is laid.

Like earth, awake, and warm, and bright With joy the spirit moves and burns; So up to thee! O Fount of Light! Our light returns.