An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
I am fairly tired – bored beyond endurance – by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman – Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.
One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God’s will, and Fate and Evolution – let there be God!
As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
Good men do the most harm.
He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence – of talking without meaning – is never effaced.
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
History is only a value of relation.