It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.
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.
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.
No age seemed the age of romance to itself.