Quote collection
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"What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one."
"We are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal."
"Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men."
"Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought."
"There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."
"History is the distillation of rumour."
"We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one."
"There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!"
"In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men--genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion."
"Macaulay is well for awhile, but one wouldn't live under Niagara."
"One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace?"
"A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering."
"O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim."
"Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?"
"In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these."
"So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth."
"Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future."
"persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy"
"It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it."
"I had a lifelong quarrel with God, but in the end we made up."