Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense.
Category Archive: William Lyon Phelps
The happiest people in this world are those who have the most interesting thoughts.
In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.
If I were running the world I would have it rain only between 2 and 5 a.m. Anyone who was out then ought to get wet.
If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.
A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view halfway up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands.
One of the secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be, I think, an American cow.