Quote collection
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"The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles."
"Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight."
"Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account."
"I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us."
"He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power."
"All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey."
"A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price."
"And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done. What is useful will last, what is hurtful will sink."
"The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existance of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well."
"What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed."
"Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented with fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere.--Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving."
"The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels."
"The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed."
"All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light, is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,--an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed."
"Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience."
"We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause."
"I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion."
"When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint."
"England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children."
"As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it."