For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Blessed are those who have no talent!
All men are poets at heart.
Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
In every man’s memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high human office, – a sacrament when its aim is grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom or for love or devotion.
The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.
One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.
The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.
There the great Planter plants Of fruitful worlds the grain, And with a million spells enchants The souls that walk in pain.
Or whipping its rough surface for a trout...
Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.
Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.