I call the book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with the pen.
We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!
Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.
He that has done nothing has known nothing.
Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
Pin thy faith to no man’s sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?
Our very walking is an incessant falling; a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.
Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts.
Courtesy is the due of man to man; not of suit-of-clothes to suit-of-clothes.
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
This little life has its duties that are great-that are alone great, and that go up to heaven and down to hell.
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
There is precious instruction to be got by finding we were wrong.