Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.
Joy is the best of wine.
Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.
... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do.
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.
Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.
That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
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