We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful.
Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already.
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.
We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.
I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes.
For everything you gain, you lose something.
The enthusiast always finds the master, the masters, whom he seeks. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself.
The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.
If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.
The wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.
The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.
And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.
The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; ’t is all toy figures in a toyhouse.
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us, – kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show, – the rootsof all things are in man.
For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is set above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.
Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.