Quotes by Nicholas Murray Butler

“Optimism is the foundation of courage.”

“Many peoples tombstones should read Died at 30, burried at 60.”

“Necessity does the work of courage.”

“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.”

“Those people who think only of themselves, are hopelessly uneducated. They are not educated, no matter how instructed they may be.”

“One of the embarrassments of being a gentleman is that you are not permitted to be violent in asserting your rights”

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

A degenerate nobleman or one that is proud of his birth is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

To swallow gudgeons ere theyre catchd And count their chickens ere theyre hatchd.

The forty-four-hour week has no charm for me. Im looking for a forty-hour day.

Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

This was the pennworth of his thought.