Representative Men quotes

All mythology opens with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society;

Nature seems to exist for the excellent.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and actually, or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their names.

I know not what would happen to us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone.

I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.

We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure.

that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or not.

Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within, outward.

His own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to be salt.

The river makes its own shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome—harvest for food, institutions for expression, weapons to fight with, and disciples to explain it.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his own shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use of service from superior men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy.

we wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!

Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer.

Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.

How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor.

Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.

Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step—we are better served through our sympathy.

Activity is contagious.

Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, “you must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”

These teach us the qualities of primary nature—admit us to the constitution of things.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes.

But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool’s cap too long.” We will know the meaning of our economies and politics.

His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help:—other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, “I pray you, let me never hear that man’s name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington—“Damn George Washington!” is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation.

There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach.

The more we are drawn, the more we are repelled.

There is something not solid in the good that is done for us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it.

Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;—but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill?

The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy.

It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we must have society.

As to what we call the masses, and common men;—there are no common men.

All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere.

Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature.

Other days will demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them.

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies—that there is true ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals.

even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history.

The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind.

How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men—Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor;

and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.

… is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.

If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them.

He ground them all into paint.

As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.

If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint.

As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.

He was born 430 BC, about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had an early inclination for war;

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements.

It is as easy to be great as to be small.

The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls, is because they are not in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare, as to be incredible;

as the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “

If Jove should descend to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.

”

His illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of obstetric art is good philosophy; and his finding that word “cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still.

No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.

What moderation, and understatement, and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it;

and his discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve—so excellent is his Greek love of boundary, and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms, one is not more secure, than in following Plato in his flights.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

He has finished his thinking, before he brings it to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he needs.

whose temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion.

But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it.

No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls.

When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment; and, refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government, was condemned to die, and sent to the prison.

Socrates entered the prison, and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison, whilst he was there.

Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. “Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to everything you say.”

This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.

There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on, and forgets him.

So it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side, and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was;

but countries, and things of which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato.

He has clapped copyright on the world.

This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.

These things we are forced to say, if we must consider the effort of Plato, or of any philosopher, to dispose of Nature—which will not be disposed of.

No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

But there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims.

But there is a class who lead us into another region—the world of morals, or of will. What is singular about this region of thought, is, its claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of everything else.

For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other.

Perhaps the true subject of the Conjugal Love is Conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul.

Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls.

We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other fellowships of joy.

But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads crysipelas—show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads hell—show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.

The less we have to do with our sins, the better.

No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions. “That is active duty,” say the Hindus, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation; all other duty is good only unto weariness.”

’Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and incommunicableness.

Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud.

When he mounts into the heavens, I do not hear its language.

A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes me one.

Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture; they are all country parsons;

’Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.

Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature; others are forever prevented from ascending out of it.

Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lacklustre landscape.

No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.

The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great name will turn a sentence.

I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power of virtue?

Why be an angel before your time?

These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them?

If they keep too much at home, they pine.” Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let it be solid, and seasonable, and our own.

A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.

The soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature.

We are golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea.

The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events, but mainly men.

that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers.

Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the extremes, and having itself a positive quality;

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.

Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

One has the same pleasure in it that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.

I know not anywhere the book that seems less written.

It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists.

Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones.

We hearken to the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men’s eyes conserving and constructive;

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them.

The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness of property, and the drowsiness of institutions.

But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties wish everyone committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are those of the “Soul’s Errand” of Sir Walter Raleigh;

I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. ’Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much.

Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.

The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it.

The beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions in his own life.

Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life;

What front can we make against these unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against climate, against barbarism, in my country?

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists.

The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one.

This is the drop which balances the sea.

I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible.

a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the first motion to prove his strength—hands, feet, senses, gave way, and would not serve him.

He was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling

: and still the sirens sang, “The attractions are proportioned to the destinies.”

We see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages.

But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him.

He snaps his finger at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men.

The hero is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point.

The greatest genius is the most indebted man.

A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country.

Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations.

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakespeare’s youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them.

from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely.

He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it.

Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world—

He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home.

Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely.

He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it.

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

There never was a time when there was none. All the truly diomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books.

The world takes liberties with world-books.

Vedas, Aesop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us.

Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;—yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable.

You cannot see the mountain near.

It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now;

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us.

We are very clumsy writers of history.

We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born;

and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well.

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil.

The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins;

the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting; the Ballads of Spain and Scotland—the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history.

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary.

He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand.

Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was—and he is the best in the world. But it turns out;

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.

A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors.

For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self—the subtlest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship.

But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately.

He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other.

This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd.

He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.

A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture.

Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million.

There are always objects; but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare;

Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates, that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper.

Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect

; and Saadi says, “It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?” Not less sovereign and cheerful—much more sovereign and cheerful is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men.

and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power—what is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his command, into entertainments.

He was master of the revels to mankind.

Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in …

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or memoirs, or lives of Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it his own history.

Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers.

He is no saint—to use his own word, “no capuchin,” and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street.

he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these alone, but on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth—but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means.

Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth—but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.

The sentiments were for women and children.

Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon’s own sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, he addressed him—“Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.”

He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things.

Men give way before such a man as before natural events.

To be sure, there are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors, and mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the presence of scholars and grammarians;

He is a realist, terrific to all talkers, and confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely, by insight.

He never blundered into victory, but won his battles in his head, before he won them on the field.

His principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796, he writes to the Directory: “I have conducted the campaign without consulting anyone.

They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread; and the king and his ministers, not knowing what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business.

Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, knew what to do next.

It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next;

But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens.

Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse from abroad.

Napoleon had been the first man of the world if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action.

and as it is, at all times, the belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better.

I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments.

Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people’s. The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody’s novelties—made infinite objection: mustered all the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections.

But Bonaparte knew better than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments.

Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people’s.

The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody’s novelties—made infinite objection: mustered all the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections.

“I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.” To make a great noise is his favorite design. “

A great reputation is a great noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.

” His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving men—interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody.

Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.” His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving men—interest and fear.

Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody.

I do not even love my brothers; perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why?—because his character pleases me; he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow never shed a tear.

I omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely, that these two parties differ only as young and old.

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat.

The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.

yes, and with poetic justice, its fate, in his own. The counterrevolution, the counter-party, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience.

Never was such a leader so endowed, and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe?

The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth.

Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth.

Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

His office is a reception of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent and characteristic experiences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history.

The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.

Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face.

The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature strives upward; and, in man, the report is something more than print of the seal.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history.

The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow.

The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone.

He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen—and he will write.

In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.

In conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials; as our German poet said, “some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.” He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely.

In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials; as our German poet said, “some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.”

He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely.

Vexations, and a tempest of passion, only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes, “When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;”

and if we knew the genesis of fine-strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck.

His failures are the preparation of his victories.

A new thought, or a crisis of passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric—is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No;

A certain partiality, a headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like—but you do it at your peril.

Men’s actions are too strong for them.

Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again.

The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.

The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance;

is he of the movement? is he of the establishment?—but, Is he anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common sense of mankind asks.

Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know.

Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able.

A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground.

Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man’s wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas.

What new mythologies sail through his head!

The Greeks said, that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man’s wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head!

The Greeks said, that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon which journeys with us lends its majesties to trifles, and to matters of convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal performances. He was the soul of his century.

He has said the best things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did—and, with whatever loss of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; and they have some doctorial skill.

Eyes are better, on the whole, than telescopes or microscopes.

He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind.

and this, by tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, every institution, utensil, and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He had an extreme impatience of conjecture, and of rhetoric. “

I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what he knows.

” He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has explained the distinction between the antique and the modern spirit and art.

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify every term in popular use. The Devil had played an important part in mythology in all times.

Goethe would have no word that does not cover a thing.

The same measure will still serve: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.” So he flies at the throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European;