All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.
You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist – all he must learn are the two words “supply” and “demand.”
The genuine essence of truth never dies.
The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
The scandalous bronze-lacquer age of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotences, and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the pit follow it.
He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.
No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.
The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.
If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon.
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
The greatest security against sin is to be shocked at its presence.
Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.