Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.
Friendship buys friendship.
Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.
There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy.
Genius, even, as it is the greatest good, is he greatest harm.
God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.
The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power – the gentleman.
Our globe discovers its bidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses.
We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.
I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.
No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.
The street is full of humiliations to the proud.
Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.
Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.
The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.