The archenemy is the arch stupid!
Biography is the only true history.
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Let him who wants to move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.
Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.
The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.
It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.
With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much.
Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.
Variety is the condition of harmony.
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.