Maxim Quotes

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Immanuel Kant

A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest of treasures for the man of the world, for he knows how to intersperse conversation with the former in fit places, and to recollect the latter on proper occasions.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.

William Mathews

Few maxims are true in every respect.

Marquis de Vauvenargues

Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.

James Mackintosh

Maxims are like lawyers who must need to see but one side of the case.

Frank Gelett Burgess

A man of maxims only, is like a cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

Thomas Babington

To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute.

James Buchanan

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Winston Churchill

The thrifty maxim of the wary Dutch, Is to save all the Money they can touch.

Benjamin Franklin

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

William Hazlitt

We maximize what they can do while still recognizing limitations.

Tammera Lawson

Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused myself to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.

Lord Chesterfield

Tis an old maxim in the schools, That flattery's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit, Will condescend to take a bit.

Jonathan Swift