Quote collection
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"Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power."
"I am a willow of the wilderness, Loving the wind that bent me."
"Every thought is public, Every nook is wide; Thy gossips spread each whisper, And the gods from side to side."
"The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam."
"The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics."
"We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man."
"We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us."
"Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure."
"Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men."
"The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality."
"Women stand related to beautiful nature around us, and the enamoured youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind: teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult."
"Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious."
"As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action."
"The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine."
"My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself,I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of the individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one."
"In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say."
"Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim."
"Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is."
"In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown."
"When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him."