He that has a secret to hide should not only hide it but hide that he has to hide it.
If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.
How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul’s seat and true pineal gland of the body social – I mean a purse?
Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God’s judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.
Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.
There are remedies for all things but death.
Debt is a bottomless sea.
God Almighty never created a man half as wise as he looks.
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
All comes out even at the end of the day.
So here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away? Out of eternity This new day is born, Into eternity At night will return.
Is not every meanest day the confluence of two eternities?
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?