If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.
All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.
An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.
All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.
We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.
The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, – more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.
Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.
In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.
Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.
For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend.
The highest end of government is the culture of men.
The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.
Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.
Nature is upheld by antagonism.
Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.
As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.
But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.