Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.
If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.
Beside some philosophers of larger vision, Carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems.
Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.
If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him.
The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.
The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so.
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.
What exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals.
The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.
When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.
The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.
We make needless ado about capital punishment, – taking lives, when there is no life to take.
So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.
So near along life’s stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.
There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.
Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.