22 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the 

 other woes of mankind, is wisdom. 



Next to being right in this world, the best of all 

 things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because 

 you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing 

 about between right and wrong, vibrating and 

 fluctuating, you come out nowhere ; but if you are 

 absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, 

 you must, some of these days, have the extreme 

 good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, 

 and that sets you all straight again. 



No man ever understands Shakespeare until he is 

 old, though the youngest may admire him, the 

 reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of 

 the youngest and harmonises with the ripest and 

 richest experience of the oldest. 



It is not a question whether one order of study 

 or another should predominate. It is a question 

 of what topics of education you shall select which 

 will combine all the needful elements in such due 

 proportion as to give the greatest amount of food, 

 support, and encouragement to those faculties which 

 enable us to appreciate truth, and to profit by 

 those sources of innocent happiness which are 

 open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that 

 which is bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep 

 clear of the multitude of pitfalls and dangers which 

 beset those who break through the natural or 

 moral laws. 



