Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o’er him planned.
What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.
God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear this morning brings The outrage of the poor.
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.
I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son.
That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.
You cannot make a cheap palace.
The education of the will is the object of our existence.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.
A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.
If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.
Skepticism is slow suicide.
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Society is a hospital of incurables.