There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.
There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.
There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.
To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.
There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling--no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination.
Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
The further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does "fame" become, especially of the literary sort. This species of "fame" a waggish acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured.
As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.
There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.
Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
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