There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.
A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole.
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.
There is always safety in valor.
A man of no conversation should smoke.
The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
To fill the hour──that is happiness.
The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.
Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.
Language is fossil Poetry.
Skill to do comes of doing.
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.
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