He’s true to God who’s true to man.
You’ve gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.
The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.
Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.
Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful, – the human soul!
God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.
Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.
There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.
A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.
Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.
Truth only needs to be for once spoken out; and there’s such music in her, such strange rhythm, as makes men’s memories her joyous slaves.
Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.
The material of thought re-acts upon the thought itself.
Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.
The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
Taste is the next gift to genius.
I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.