Quote collection
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"Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives."
"The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also."
"What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest."
"What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do."
"There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses,--only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it."
"Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them."
"This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays."
"The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco."
"The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man."
"Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons."
"To have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation - this to to have succeeded."
"Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life."
"To live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom."
"Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver."
"The street is full of humiliations to the proud."
"The world is plentiful with honey, but only the humble bee can collect it."
"Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience."
"Our opinions of the world, are confessions of character."
"Knowledge is the only elegance."
"Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is."