Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.
The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
No violent extreme endures.
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.