Love not Pleasure; love God.
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
Work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at all things.
The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
In every man’s writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
Custom doth make dotards of us all.
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it.
Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
Friend, hast thou considered the “rugged, all-nourishing earth,” as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?
Venerable to me is the hard hand, – crooked, coarse, – wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.
Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.
The greatest of all heroes is One – whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man’s whole history on earth.
The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.
What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God’s name, leave uncredited. At your peril do not try believing that!
To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.
O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.