One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s ugliness; one man’s wisdom anpther’s folly.
To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.
We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.
A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.
Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives.
In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.
Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- “‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.”
We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see – not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
Never lose an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful. It is God’s handwriting a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew.
I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?
The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.
Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.
The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.
There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.