Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.
What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
To genius life never grows commonplace.
Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.
That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.
Those who love are but one step from heaven.
Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire’s cup to the brim!
Silence is sorrow’s best food.
Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?
And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.
A woman’s love Is mighty, but a mother’s heart is weak, And by its weakness overcomes.
For there’s nothing we read of in torture’s inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you can’t see it – but all the same, it is sixteen pounds to the square inch.
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it.
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.
Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.
Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then.