Quotes from William Mathews

It cannot be too often repeated that it is not helps, but obstacles, not facilities, but difficulties that make men.

As with the acquisition, so with the use of money; they way in which a man spends it is often one of the surest tests of character.

[A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!

They never get ahead an inch, because they are always hugging some coward maxim, which they can only interpret literally.... Of what use is it "to be sawing about a set of maxims to which there is a complete set of antagonist maxims"? Proverbs, it has been well said, should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half-truth.

No man ever sailed over exactly the same route that another sailed over before him; every man who starts on the ocean of life arches his sails to an untried breeze.

Proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.

In the world a man lives in his own age; in solitude in all ages.