New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.
Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or mother’s life?
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.
I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.
Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.
A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.
The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.
It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.
Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.
There is also something excellent in every audience, – the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.
The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.
Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear.
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.
I quote another man’s saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, – so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.
Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.