For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.
I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.
The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.
A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.
The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.
This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.
The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.
They have seen but half the universe who never have been shown the house of pain.
I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.
Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.
He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
The gates of thought, – how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways, I keep and pass and turn again.