Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!
The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far.
We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.
When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.
All men in the abstract are just and good.
Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.
A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.
Great men are sincere.
Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.
The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
There comes a period of the imagination to each – a later youth – the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.
We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.
Mankind divides itself into two classes, – benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.
All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.