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.
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?
A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.