The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects.
Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.
If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui.
But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.
I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.
And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.
As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.
Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world?
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all.
The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.
What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!
Politics is but a narrow field.
As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.
Comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination. The imagination knows – nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry – and it controls the breast.
Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.
We should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects.
It gets laughed at because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction.