Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Be not the first by whom the new are tired, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

The last shall not become the first if the last is lagging behind.

The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts when arranged differently!

Y el público siempre pide lo nuevo, la novedad. Pero ¡si la novedad es tan vieja como el mundo!

Let no man, therefore, lose heart from thinking that he cannot do what others have done before him; for, as I said in my Preface, men are born, and live, and die, always in accordance with the same rules.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.

Pray tell me, can you make fast,
After due search, your faith to any question?
Look back o'er ages, ere unto the stake fast
You bind yourself, and call some mode the best one.
Nothing more true than not to trust your senses;
And yet what are your other evidences?

For me, I know nought; nothing I deny,
Admit, reject, contemn; and what know you,
Except perhaps that you were born to die?
And both may after all turn out untrue.
An age may come, Font of Eternity,
When nothing shall be either old or new.

He who repeats a tale after a man,
Is bound to say, as nearly as he can,
Each single word, if he remembers it,
However rudely spoken or unfit,
Or else the tale he tells will be untrue,
The things invented and the phrases new.