It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God’s Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.
Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.
The devil has his elect.
The age of miracles is forever here.
History is a great dust heap.
Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.
The king is the man who can.
Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
Out of the lowest depths there is a path to the loftiest heights.
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don’t half know to this day?
Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
Life is a series of lessons that have to be understood.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?