Quote collection
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"In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem."
"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?"
"Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star."
"Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition."
"Only to youth will spring be spring."
"The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air."
"Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table."
"There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society."
"A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul."
"Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic."
"The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once."
"Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school."
"[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand."
"Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind."
"I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped."
"There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation."
"I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live."
"Goodness that preaches undoes itself."
"The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood."
"A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation."