The Persians are called the French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wildstrong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness, of genius.
Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.
Macaulay is well for awhile, but one wouldn’t live under Niagara.
Man is a tool-using animal.
We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.
All work of man is as the swimmer’s: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
Affectation is the product of falsehood.
The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men’s hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men – genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion.
In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.
A man – be the heavens ever praised! – is sufficient for himself.
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.
One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace?
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nusiance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissable manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith.
Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.
Creation is great, and cannot be understood.
Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.