No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science.
Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.
Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England, – a creed ample enough for this life and the next.
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?
Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.
They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.
Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face.
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.
Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.
Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.
It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what we call the rights of men become turbulent and dangerous.
And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.
The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.
There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual.