Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man’s hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!
It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.
Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay’s, and mere words.
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
Violence does even justice unjustly.
Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.
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.