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.
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.