To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.
Time makes ancient good uncouth.
No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
History is clarified experience.
Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.
It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.
In the scale of the destinies, brawn will never weigh so mach as brain.
There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.
It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reasoning is.
Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.
Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.
Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.
It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.
There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.
Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.
If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.
In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.
The discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.