Too soon did the doctors of the church forget that the heart – the moral nature – was the beginning and the end, and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion.
The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.
As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.
To leave no interval between the sentence and the fulfillment of it doth beseem God only, the Immutable!
I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two springs in every year.
Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!
We should manage our thoughts as shepherds do their flowers in making a garland: first, select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, that every one may reflect a part of its color and brightness on the next.
There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.
A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.
The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.
Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind.
The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.
Is duty a mere sport, or an employ! Life an entrusted talent or a toy!
Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower.
Perhaps ’tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm.
One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.
A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.
Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.
The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.