Quote collection
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"Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."
"Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never sought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance suppose The selfsame power that brought me there brought you."
"Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so."
"And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it." MARTIN LUTHER, Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day."
"Fear, Craft and Avarice Cannot rear a State."
"Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray."
"Gold and iron are good To buy iron and gold."
"The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds."
"When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce."
"We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones."
"Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new."
"The exercise of all the senses is as intense pleasure, as anyone will find, who recovers the use of one after being deprived of it."
"Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of."
"I will not live out of me I will not see with others' eyes My good is good, my evil ill I would be free."
"Whenever the average intellect of the clergy declines in the balance with the average intellect of the people the churches will be shut up and a new order of things [will] begin."
"Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the unvierse, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them?"
"Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides."
"There are two laws discreteNot reconciled,Law for man, and law for thing."
"The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship."
"Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit."