Dinners are defined as ‘the ultimate act of communion;’ men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.
The purpose of man is in action not thought.
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one’s existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows.
Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!
Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man’s bell.
And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
There is endless merit in a man’s knowing when to have done.
France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.
Close thy Byron ; open thy Goethe .
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.
In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.
The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.