Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Good criticism is very rare and always precious.
If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
A man should give us a sense of mass.
I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.
Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land, – travel a whole day together, – looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.
The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed, – because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.
Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country.
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning.
The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.
A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips.
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.
We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.
The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things.
The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidatethe pale scholar.
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.
The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.