Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech, – a Sharp’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.
The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.
Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth.
There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.
Here or nowhere is our heaven.
This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouchingthe old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.
Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one school as if there was no other.
Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins.
Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.
It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.
Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness- stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach and four.
There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.
How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!
You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?
It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.
What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.
He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth.
Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “Tell the tailors,” said he, “to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.” His companion’s prayer is forgotten.