The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sorrows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the goal.
Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy.
Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
A thinking man is the worst enemy the Prince of Darkness can have; every time such an one announces himself, I doubt not there runs a shudder through the nether empire; and new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to, if possible, entrap and hoodwink and handcuff him.
No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.
All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.
Properly speaking, all true work is religion.
The person who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye.
Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will daily grow more and more right. It is at the bottom of the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!
Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God’s creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.
Rest is for the dead.
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all.
In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people’s disputes but he heartily repented of it.