When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.
The finest poetry was first experience.
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.
Don’t trust children with edge tools. Don’t trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!
The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.
Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another’s dogmatism.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars.
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.
The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.
As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.