We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
He that can work is born to be king of something.
The press is the fourth estate of the realm.
True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
Love is ever the beginning of knowledge as fire is of light.
Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.
The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.
Painful for a person is rebellious independence, only in loving companionship with his associates does a person feel safe: Only in reverently bowing down before the higher does a person feel exalted.
Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.
Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
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