Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them?
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.
However much we admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.
We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.
We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.
The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.
Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.
There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.
Some creatures are made to see in the dark.
There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect thegeneral illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.
Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.
It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
There is no history of how bad became better.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.