Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.
In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong, – if it is only to make abetter paste blacking, – and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.
If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.
All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story.
Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy.
Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good.
It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.
There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.
The tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.
If a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manfully the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear; his brave back would go a-begging.
I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad anddoes me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.
Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.
Few, if any, creatures are equally active all night.
Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved, – if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.
Men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality; but every lover, the world over, believesin its inconceivable purity.
I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.
Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?