Quotes about Maxims

Your maxims are proverbs of ashes; your defenses are defenses of clay.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Proverbs may not improperly be called the philosophy of the common people.

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world. But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

Good things come in small packages.