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.
If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare’s intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.
Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.
In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world’s Priest; – guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.
Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.
He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing.
Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.