As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.
Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.
Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in.
The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.
The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.
Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.
A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.
Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.
A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.
A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.
The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.
The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions.
Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.
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