We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.
Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.
I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
But the might-have-been is but boggy ground to build upon.
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.
Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. “I would prefer not to quit you”, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.
I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.
To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.