A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.
I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.
Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
If I had my way, the world would hear a pretty stern command – Exit Christ.
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.
A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness, – at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
Habit and imitation – there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.
What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.
Money will buy money’s worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it?
Eyes bright, with many tears, behind them.
The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician’s aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.
The true epic of our times is not “Arm’s and the Man,” but “Tools and the Man” – an infinitely wider kind of epic.