Quote collection
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"Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality."
"All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal."
"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better."
"Every man believes that he has greater possibilities."
"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."
"Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act."
"Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching."
"Power educates the potentate."
"An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures."
"The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive."
"I admire answers to which no answers can be made."
"Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his."
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm."
"Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her."
"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them."
"Power dwells with cheerfulness."
"So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head."
"The language of the street is always strong."
"Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare."
"Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough."