To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.
We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together.
There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
Consciousness is a born hermit.
What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.
Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.
There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn’t settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn’t enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.
O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise,. And on the inward vision close the eyes,. But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.
The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.
To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.
Life is an art not to be learned by observation.
Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.