New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.
Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.
Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature’s common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.
Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.
Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.
The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.
Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge.
One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.
The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.
Tyranny is always weakness.
Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
Winds wanders, and dews drip earthward; Rains fall, suns rise and set; Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.
An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.
The rich man’s sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.
Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.
They have rights who dare maintain them.
Stern men with empires in their brains.