The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.
The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
Language is the archives of history.
Knowledge is the only elegance.
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
A man is a god in ruins.
The greatest man in history was the poorest.
There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
The first lesson of history is that evil is good.
History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.
There is properly no history, only biography.
In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.
Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.
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