It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.
The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being.
While we read history we make history.
The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.
Happiness is speechless.
Life is a rich strain of music, suggesting a realm too fair to be.
There is very little moral mixture in the ‘Antislavery’ feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.
The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
I think that to have known one good, old man-one man, who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm-branch, waving all discords into peace-helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons.
The test of civilization is the estimate of woman.
Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.
The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they’ve reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you’re just horny. It doesn’t mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.
A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.
Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry.
A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it.
Our common liberty is consecrated by a common sorrow.
It is the most human and kindly of seasons, as fully penetrated and irradiated with the feeling of human brotherhood, which is the essential spirit of Christianity, as the month of June with sunshine and the balmy breath of roses.
Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.
Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.