Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.
When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don’t know, from a person whom they do know – an authority good for nothing.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.
They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon.
Much of this world’s wisdom is still acquired by necromancy, – by consulting the oracular dead.
Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.
Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.
Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day’s of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.
The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul’s best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.
Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.
Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.
I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven.
Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.
Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.
I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.
Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias.
True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them.
Many a man’s vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.
A lawyer’s brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.
The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?