One of the Godlike things of this world is the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men.
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up.
If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won’t in the end affirm or deny anything.
The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity.
One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
My whinstone house my castle is, I have my own four walls.
Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
History is the new poetry.
In a certain sense all men are historians.
Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.
No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.
It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.