Quote collection
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"The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor."
"The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man."
"I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times."
"Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market."
"This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone tocount myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person who I pay with money, whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other."
"The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidatethe pale scholar."
"The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things."
"A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips."
"The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor."
"I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected."
"A man should give us a sense of mass."
"We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours."
"Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added."
"Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years."
"Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists."
"We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own."
"When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea--that conserves it; ideas only save races."
"The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent."
"Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence."
"The essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old."