They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.
The gift without the giver is rare.
New occasions teach new duties.
He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’t is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin’s lamp...
But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey’s end.
A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.