Quote collection
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"An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary."
"Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used."
"Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour."
"Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not."
"Ability without honor has no value."
"You've got to be taught, to hate and fear, You've got to be taught, from year to year, It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully taught."
"One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe."
"Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it."
"He only is a well-made man who has a good determination."
"The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual."
"Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers."
"To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man."
"We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men."
"Society does not love its unmaskers."
"It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day."
"The first lesson of history is that evil is good."
"To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom."
"All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not."
"Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universalmovements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know."
"Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know."