Quote collection
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"Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?"
"Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?"
"It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one."
"The mathematics of high achievement"
"What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?"
"It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men."
"Just in ratio as knowledge increases, faith diminishes."
"Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on."
"Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods."
"Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him."
"With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!"
"I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen."
"The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper."
"There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it."
"Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown . . . Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of men."
"A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!"
"It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths."
"I have no patience whatever with these gorilla damnifications of humanity."
"No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy."
"The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science."