The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
Of a truth, men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
What is all knowledge except recorded experience, and a product of history?
It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.
A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what may be called thought.
Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: “A judicious man,” says he, “looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.”
What, in the devil’s name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.
Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: “Do the duty which lies nearest to thee,” which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.
Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.
The actual well seen is ideal.
Experience of actual fact either teaches fools or abolishes them.
O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, “here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see.
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.