Not he who scorns the Saviour’s yoke Should wear his cross upon the heart.
Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the over-mastering present.
A noble soul spreads even over a face in which the architectonic beauty is wanting an irresistible grace, and a often even triumphs over the natural disfavor.
Men show no mercy and expect no mercy, when honor calls, or when they fight for their idols or their gods.
In the ardor of pursuit men soon forget the goal from which they start.
Wine invents nothing; it only tattles.
Truth is more than a dream and a song.
Time is a blooming field: nature is ever teeming with life: and all is seed, and all is fruit.
Yet have I ever heard it said that spies and tale-bearers have done more mischief in this world than poisoned bowl or the assassin’s dagger.
It is not the mere station of life that stamps the value on us, but the manner in which we act our part.
When the measured dance of the hours brings back the happy smile of spring, the buried dead is born again in the life-glance of the sun. The germs which perished to the eye within the cold breast of the earth spring up with joy in the bright realm of day.
A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and constrains it, but only by strength of will. Consequently the sublime soul is only free by broken efforts.
Whatever lives, lives to die in sorrow. We engage our hearts, and grasp after the things of this world, only to undergo the pang of losing them.
Sorrows must die with the joys they outnumber.
Without a home must the soldier go, a changeful wanderer, and can warm himself at no home-lit hearth.
Let him that sows the serpent’s teeth not hope to reap a joyous harvest. Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, its own avenging angel, – dark misgivings at the inmost heart.
A childlike mind in its simplicity practises that science of good to which the wise may be blind.
It is at the approach of extreme danger when a hollow puppet can accomplish nothing, that power falls into the mighty hands of nature, of the spirit giant-born, who listens only to himself, and knows nothing of compacts.
Only the soldier is a free man, because he can look death in the face.
The world’s history is the world’s judgment.