Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.
Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature, – the sweet, without the other side, – the bitter.
Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage ofsociety; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own.
The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.
Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.
The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.
We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.
Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.
If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.
The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun – but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.
That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
The soul circumscribes all things.
The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.