The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.
We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds.
Gold and iron are good To buy iron and gold.
As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.
Night-dreams trace on Memory’s wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
Fear, Craft and Avarice Cannot rear a State.
And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, “If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it.” MARTIN LUTHER, Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day.
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.
Nature abhors the old.
If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop.
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair’s breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.
Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as ‘glittering generalities,’ have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.
Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.