We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.
The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.
The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.
In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.
What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.
Duty grows everywhere – like children, like grass.
Thus is man made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide.
Education should be as broad as man.
Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
Only by the supernatural is a man strong – only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist – nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.
Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.
This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name, – this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.
Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.
I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
There is hope in extravagance, there is none in routine.
Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.
The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.
Fear is cruel and mean.