Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal.
Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of woman.
The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.
The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.
I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.
As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.
England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.
Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.
Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking; some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.
When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.
I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.
Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
Fate is unpenetrated causes.
We can only obey our own polarity.
My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.