Society and Solitude quotes

He left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself.

Set a hedge here; set oaks there,—trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.

The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.

When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there,—trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.

The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.

Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not.

above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.

Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not.

All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London.

He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress.

He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges.

His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality.

He had a remorse running to despair, of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

He admired in Newton, not so much his theory of the moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the “Philosophical Transactions”:

so she guards them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port, and clubs, we should have had no “Theory of the Sphere,” and no “Principia.” They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels.

Each must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.

Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: “There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house;

Now he hardly seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who cannot protect himself?

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you.

Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you.

Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner.

Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he?

Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the world.

Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the world.

“If I stay,” said Dante, when there was question of going to Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”

But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is organic. I have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for only one person. He affects to be a good companion;

yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve, and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The co-operation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative.

’Tis fine for us to talk, we sit and muse, and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction.

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons, whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight, and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to …

’Tis no wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies should be so small. Like President Tyler, our party falls from us every day, and we must ride in a sulky at last.

Dear heart! take it sadly home to thee,—there is no co-operation.

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light;

… tears and glory,—though there be for heroes this moral union, yet, they, too, are as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the co-operation of a ship’s company or of a fire-club.

But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know!

Nor dare they tell what they think of each other, when they meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!

Nor is the rule otherwise for literature. If you would learn to write, ’tis in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square.

The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration.

If you would learn to write, ’tis in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration. His products are as needful as those of the baker or the weaver.

But the people are to be taken in very small doses.

If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar.

In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy.

But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar.

In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications.

We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them.

The remedy is, to reinforce each of these moods from the other. Conversation will not corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in our own garb and speech, and with the energy of health to select what is ours and reject what is not.

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.

Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs?

I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone.

Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone.

Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place, into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness.

It would be more true to say, they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation.

All conversation is a magnetic experiment.

I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them all wretched.

I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them all wretched.

’Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor.

Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.

Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.

Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.

We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands.

Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.

We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other.

The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands.

He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sun-stroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and delight.

’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier.

You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar,—and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed!

… than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves.

That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing.

Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. “It was a great instruction,” said a saint in Cromwell’s war, “that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.”

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,—Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us.

The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

What is in, will out.

It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.

The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done. What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth.

Speech is a great pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.

The utterance of thought and emotion in speech and action may be conscious or unconscious. The sucking child is an unconscious actor. The man in an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor.

Let us now consider this law as it affects the works that have beauty for their end, that is, the productions of the Fine Arts. Here again the prominent fact is subordination of man.

His art is the least part of his work of art.

A great deduction is to be made before we can know his proper contribution to it.

Especially have we this infirmity of faith in contemporary genius. We fear that Allston and Greenough did not foresee and design all the effect they produce on us.

Our arts are happy hits.

We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows, or like a traveller, surprised by a mountain echo, whose trivial word returns to him in romantic thunders.

In view of these facts, I say that the power of Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circumstances.

Nature paints the best part of the picture; carves the best part of the statue; builds the best part of the house; and speaks the best part of the oration.

For all the advantages to which I have adverted are such as the artist did not consciously produce. He relied on their aid, he put himself in the way to receive aid from some of them;

Hence the term abandonment, to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd.

In poetry, where every word is free, every word is necessary.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind, than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind, than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet. The feeling of all great poets has accorded with this.

They found the verse, not made it.

The muse brought it to them.

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing.

So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life.

Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different degrees. One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep. He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition.

He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.

He is the true potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who know how to govern.

The definitions of eloquence describe its attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, advertised in Athens, “that he would cure distempers of the mind with words.”

Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, advertised in Athens, “that he would cure distempers of the mind with words.” No man has a prosperity so high or firm but two or three words can dishearten it.

There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.

Isocrates described his art as “the power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great,”—an acute but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says:

As we know, the power of discourse of certain individuals amounts to fascination, though it may have no lasting effect. Some portion of this sugar must intermingle.

The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.

It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds the hearer fast;

Ah! he is thinking of resistance, and of a different turn from his own. But what if one should come of the same turn of mind as his own, and who sees much farther on his own way than he?

A man who has tastes like mine, but in greater power, will rule me any day, and make me love my ruler.

Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word eloquence, but the power that, being present, gives them their perfection, and, being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value. Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

I suspect, then, that no man does. Everything is my cousin; and whilst he speaks things, I feel that he is touching some of my relations, and I am uneasy; but whilst he deals in words, we are released from attention.

If you would lift me, you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me, you must be free.

If you would correct my false view of facts,—hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.

The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side.

His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue.

His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. “Infancy,” said Coleridge, “presents body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated.” All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters, and spurs, and puts on his faces of importance;

We are sure that the sacred form of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and sinister masks (masks which we wear and which we meet), these bloated and shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and precarious healths, and early deaths.

We live ruins amidst ruins.

The great facts are the near ones. The account of the body is to be sought in the mind. The history of your fortunes is written first in your life.

A man’s money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but should represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it.

I am not one thing and my expenditure another. My expenditure is me.

That our expenditure and our character are twain, is the vice of society.

On hearing this, we understand how these Means have come to be so omnipotent on earth. And indeed the love of wealth seems to grow chiefly out of the root of the love of the Beautiful.

The desire of gold is not for gold.

It is not the love of much wheat and wool and household-stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit. We scorn shifts; we desire the elegance of munificence;

To offer him money in lieu of these is to do him the same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum of money to release him from his engagements. The great depend on their heart, not on their purse.

Genius and virtue, like diamonds, are best plain-set,—set in lead, set in poverty.

The greatest man in history was the poorest. How was it with the captains and sages of Greece and Rome, with Socrates, with Epaminondas? Aristides was made general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute which each state was to furnish against the barbarian.

To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence,—a credit-system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation.

We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man.

If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from him.

With a change of aim has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are.

It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor.

The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances.

The same jokes pleased, the same straws tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return seemed mere ornamental masks: underneath they were boys yet.

We never come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think that everything in their petty town is a little superior to the same thing anywhere else.

In each the circumstance signalized differs, but in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was his going to sea; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to college;

in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society; in a fifth, his new diet and regimen; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition organizations; and in a seventh, his going into them.

It is a life of toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.

I think this sad result appears in the manners. The men we see in each other do not give us the image and likeness of man. The men we see are whipped through the world; they are harried, wrinkled, anxious;

… and the sufficient reply to the sceptic who doubts the competence of man to elevate and to be elevated is in that desire and power to stand in joyful and ennobling intercourse with individuals, which makes the faith and the practice of all reasonable men.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.

2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to beauty, but in strict connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary.

The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that every man’s house is his castle: the progress of truth will make every house a shrine.

Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear he is to the soul of Nature,—how near it is to him? Will he not see, through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever;

He represents continuous hard labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants, and chemistry.

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.

The lesson one learns in fishing, yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners of Nature;

He has grave trusts confided to him.

In the great household of Nature, the farmer stands at the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each his loaf.

It is for him to say whether men shall marry or not. Early marriages and the number of births are indissolubly connected with abundance of food; or, as Burke said, “Man breeds at the mouth.” Then he is the Board of Quarantine.

Later he learns that his planting is better than hunting; that the earth works faster for him than he can work for himself,—works for him when he is asleep, when it rains, when heat overcomes him.

The sun-stroke which knocks him down brings his corn up.

As his family thrive, and other planters come up around him, he begins to fell trees, and clear good land;

Our nineteenth century is the age of tools.

They grow out of our structure. “Man is the metre of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”

… time, with its enormous strength and delicate applicability, which is made in hospitals to bring a bowl of gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the forces which upheaved and doubled over the geologic strata?

Steam is an apt scholar and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.

It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage, it must calculate interest and logarithms.

thinks he shall bottle the wave. It is, however, getting a little doubtful. Things have an ugly look still. No matter how many centuries of culture have preceded, the new man always finds himself standing on the brink of chaos, always in a crisis.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

Can anybody remember when sensible men, and the right sort of men, and the right sort of women, were plentiful? Tantalus begins to think steam a delusion, and galvanism no better than it should be.

Many facts concur to show that we must look deeper for our salvation than to steam, photographs, balloons, or astronomy. These tools have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine.

If you do not use the tools, they use you.

All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous. A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

These tools have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you.

All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

Then the political economist thinks “’tis doubtful if all the mechanical inventions that ever existed have lightened the day’s toil of one human being.”

The machine unmakes the man.

Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the engine restricts one more act of the engineer,—unteaches him. Once it took Archimedes;

What have these arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind? Are men better? ’Tis sometimes questioned whether morals have not declined as the arts have ascended.

Here are great arts and little men.

Here is greatness begotten of paltriness. We cannot trace the triumphs of civilization to such benefactors as we wish. The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade. Every victory over matter ought to recommend to man the worth of his nature.

Every one has more to hide than he has to show, or is lamed by his excellence. ’Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment.

Works and days were offered us, and we took works.

The new study of the Sanskrit has shown us the origin of the old names of God,—Dyaus, Deus, Zeus, Zeu pater, Jupiter,—names of the sun, still recognizable through the modifications of our vernacular words, importing that the Day is the Divine Power and Manifestation, and …

and the Americans were obliged to resist his attempts to make it a close sea. But if he had the earth for his pasture, and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still.

He only is rich who owns the day.

There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that. The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They are of the least pretension, and of the greatest capacity, of anything that exists.

There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that. The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They are of the least pretension, and of the greatest capacity, of anything that exists.

They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing; and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself round it like a fine drapery, clothing all its fancies! Any holiday communicates to us its color. We wear its cockade and favors in our humor.

Such are the days,—the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but what a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!

We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth to death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception?

The Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of his principal attributes.

the rich poverty, which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit for the tattle of towns. He lurks, he hides,—he who is success, reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

’Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.

One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

’Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

’Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut, and patches a boat.

a fox, into fox; and Peter and John are working up all existence into Peter and John. A poor Indian chief of the Six Nations of New York made a wiser reply than any philosopher, to some one complaining that he had not enough time.

“Well,” said Red Jacket, “I suppose you have all there is.”

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”—“En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.”

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”—“En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.”

We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify.

Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,—what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates;

But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”—“En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.” We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Life is unnecessarily long.

Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,—what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, “The gods ever give to mortals their apportioned share of reason only on one day.”

We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little abstemious and obedient?

Cannot we let the morning be?

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines. I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit.

“The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious manœuvre for hours. Well, human life is made up of such transits.

There can be no greatness without abandonment.

But here your very astronomy is an espionage. I dare not go out of doors and see the moon and stars, but they seem to measure my tasks, to ask how many lines or pages are finished since I saw them last.

Not so, as I told you, was it in Belleisle. The days at Belleisle were all different, and only joined by a perfect love of the same object.

Just to fill the hour,—that is happiness.

Fill my hour, ye gods, so that I shall not say, whilst I have done this, ‘Behold, also, an hour of my life is gone,’—but rather, ‘I have lived an hour.’”

or turn their ability indifferently in any particular direction by the strong effort of will. No, what has been best done in the world,—the works of genius,—cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought.

Shakspeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.

Poems have been written between sleeping and waking, irresponsibly. Fancy defines herself:

Then the poet is never the poorer for his song. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

The same rule holds in science. The savant is often an amateur. His performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders’ legs; he observes as other academicians observe;

Apollo stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the extreme west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride cleared the whole distance, and said, “Where shall I shoot? there is no space left.”

So the bowman’s prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow.

And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule them;

We owe to books those general benefits which come from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the moral power.

Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep.

Then, they address the imagination: only poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time. College education is the reading of certain books which the common sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated.

and to these it can afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great voices of Time.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages.

It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities.

Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not passed on it before it can be reprinted after twenty years,—and reprinted after a century!—it is as if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing.

’Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed books.

Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame.

Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame.

Be sure, then, to read no mean books.

Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, “he always went into stately shops”; and good travellers stop at the best hotels;

Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De Quincey;—a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections.

Indeed, a man’s library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania reached its height about the beginning of the present century.

But though orator and poet be of this hunger party, the capacities remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with meaning.

The man asks for a novel,—that is, asks leave for a few hours to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be.

The youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of rich music!

“Lucrezia Floriani,” “Le Péché de M. Antoine,” “Jeanne,” and “Consuelo,” of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and motives the novel still is!

Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we know it, has not yet found a tongue.

These stories are to the plots of real life what the figures in “La Belle Assemblée,” which represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits.

And so, on the whole, ’tis a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no power, no furtherance.

’Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn.

Great is the poverty of their inventions. She was beautiful, and he fell in love. Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another,—these are the main-springs:

We are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us the maximum of power and pleasure.

We need tonics, but must have those that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life burns too fast in pure oxygen, and nature has tempered the air with nitrogen.

We are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us the maximum of power and pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those that cost little or no reaction.

The flame of life burns too fast in pure oxygen, and nature has tempered the air with nitrogen.

So thought is the native air of the mind, yet pure it is a poison to our mixed constitution, and soon burns up the bone-house of man, unless tempered with affection and coarse practice in the material world.

’Tis only presence which we want. But one thing is certain,—at some rate, intercourse we must have. The experience of retired men is positive,—that we lose our days and are barren of thought for want of some person to talk with.

The understanding can no more empty itself by its own action than can a deal box.

The clergyman walks from house to house all day all the year to give people the comfort of good talk. The physician helps them mainly in the same way, by healthy talk giving a right tone to the patient’s mind.

sometimes it is love, and makes the balm of our early and of our latest days; sometimes it is thought, as from a person who is a mind only; sometimes a singing, as if the heart poured out all like a bird; sometimes experience.

With some men it is a debate; at the approach of a dispute they neigh like horses.

Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm.

And, in higher activity of mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of pleasure, and the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure.

Thought is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and born with joy.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. The affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us, which we in all ways strive to utter.

See how Nature has secured the communication of knowledge.

’Tis certain that money does not more burn in a boy’s pocket than a piece of news burns in our memory until we can tell it.

And, in higher activity of mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of pleasure, and the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure.

Thought is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and born with joy.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

The affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us, which we in all ways strive to utter.

I prize the mechanics of conversation. ’Tis pulley and lever and screw. To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good boulder,—a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the useful arts of life,—is a wonderful relief.

What are the best days in memory? Those in which we met a companion who was truly such.

How sweet those hours when the day was not long enough to communicate and compare our intellectual jewels,—the favorite passages of each book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious verses we had hoarded! What a motive had then our solitary days!

thoughts, fancies, humors flow; the cloud lifts; the horizon broadens; and the infinite opulence of things is again shown him. But the right conditions must be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be himself. Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep.

So I prize the good invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to see him.

If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in some respects enlarged. They kindle each other; and such is the power of suggestion, that each sprightly story calls out more;

Then they confirm and adorn each other; a story is matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when a gentleman has told a good thing, he immediately tells it again.

Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conversation: nothing is more rare.

’Tis wonderful how you are balked and baffled. There is plenty of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare:

There must be large reception as well as giving. How delightful after these disturbers is the radiant, playful wit of—one whom I need not name,—for in every society there is his representative.

Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks.

His conversation is all pictures: he can reproduce whatever he has seen; he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper that he disposes all others irresistibly to good-humor and discourse. Diderot said of the Abbé Galiani:

One lesson we learn early,—that, in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours.

In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

We know beforehand that yonder man must think as we do. Has he not two hands,—two feet,—hair and nails? Does he not eat,—bleed,—laugh,—cry? His dissent from me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic of persecution and of love.

Does he not eat,—bleed,—laugh,—cry? His dissent from me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic of persecution and of love. And the ground of our indignation is our conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he practises on himself.

He checks the flow of his opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk.

Yes, and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it and hides his eye from ours.

at all tables, clubs, and tête-à-têtes, the lawyers in the court-house, the senators in the capitol, the doctors in the academy, the wits in the hotel.

Best is he who gives an answer that cannot be answered again.

Omnis definitio periculosa est, and only wit has the secret. The same thing took place when Leibnitz came to visit Newton; when Schiller came to Goethe; when France, in the person of Madame de Staël, visited Goethe and Schiller;

What can you do with one of these sharp respondents? What can you do with an eloquent man? No rules of debate, no contempt of court, no exclusions, no gag-laws can be contrived, that his first syllable will not set aside or overstep and annul.

You can shut out the light, it may be; but can you shut out gravitation?

You may condemn his book; but can you fight against his thought? That is always too nimble for you, anticipates you, and breaks out victorious in some other quarter. Can you stop the motions of good sense?

But the club must be self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the outset. There are people who cannot well be cultivated, whom you must keep down and quiet if you can.

There are those who have the instinct of a bat to fly against any lighted candle and put it out,—marplots and contradictors.

There are those who go only to talk, and those who go only to hear: both are bad. A right rule for a club would be,—Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic.

I knew a scholar, of some experience in camps, who said that he liked, in a bar-room, to tell a few coon stories, and put himself on a good footing with the company; then he could be as silent as he chose.

A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains: he wants gossips.

The black-coats are good company only for black-coats; but when the manufacturers, merchants, and ship-masters meet, see how much they have to say, and how long the conversation lasts! They have come from many zones; they have traversed wide countries;

One likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a triumph to disturb, and, not less, to make in an old acquaintance unexpected discoveries of scope and power through the advantage of an inspiring subject.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

But, while we look complacently at these obvious pleasures and values of good companions, I do not forget that Nature is always very much in earnest, and that her great gifts have something serious and stern.

but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. This has made the power of the saints of the East and West, who have led the religion of great nations.

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grew.

This makes the renown of the heroes of Greece and Rome,—of Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion; of Quintus Curtius, Cato, and Regulus; of Hatem Tai’s hospitality; of Chatham, whose scornful magnanimity gave him immense popularity;

and in authentic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio, a Cæsar, a Richard Cœur de Lion, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Great Condé, a Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a Massena, and Ney.

’Tis said courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare.

Animal resistance, the instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters.

And I remember when a pair of Irish girls, who had been run away with in a wagon by a skittish horse, said that, when he began to rear, they were so frightened that they could not see the horse.

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin; shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.

Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

We want the will which advances and dictates. When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has committed a fault, not that we have taken the initiative and given the law.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Complaining never so loud, and with never so much reason, is of no use.

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin; shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.

Fear is cruel and mean.

The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

but I cannot afford to misbehave; and I do not know how I shall feel.” So great a soldier as the old French Marshal Montluc acknowledges that he has often trembled with fear, and recovered courage when he had said a prayer for the occasion.

I knew a young soldier who died in the early campaign, who confided to his sister that he had made up his mind to volunteer for the war.

“I have not,” he said, “any proper courage, but I shall never let any one find it out.”

From that moment I was as fearless and as forward as the oldest of the boat’s crew. But I dare not think what would have become of me, if, at that moment, he had scoffed and exposed me.”

Knowledge is the antidote to fear,—Knowledge, Use, and Reason, with its higher aids.

The child is as much in danger from a staircase, or the fire-grate, or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from a cannon or an ambush.

Each surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely understands the peril, and learns the means of resistance.

Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.

Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting it again.

the farmer is skilful to fight it. The neighbors run together; with pine boughs they can mop out the flame, and, by raking with the hoe a long but little trench, confine to a patch the fire which would easily spread over a hundred acres.

In short, courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

The school-boy is daunted before his tutor by a question of arithmetic, because he does not yet command the simple steps of the solution which the boy beside him has mastered.

consists in the conviction that the agents with whom you contend are not superior in strength or resources or spirit to you. The general must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the perception that they are men, and the enemy is no more.

Knowledge, yes; for the danger of dangers is illusion.

The eye is easily daunted; and the drums, flags, shining helmets, beard, and mustache of the soldier have conquered you long before his sword or bayonet reaches you.

not in the vitals, where the rupture that produces death is perhaps not felt, and the victim never knew what hurt him.

Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is.

The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers. The torments are illusory. The first suffering is the last suffering, the later hurts being lost on insensibility.

’Tis the quiet, peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”

True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves cowards.

Why do they rely on it, but because they know how potent it is with themselves?

For it is not the means on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only.

The aim reacts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means.

The meal and water that are the commissariat of the forlorn hope that stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed the sun.

There is much of fable, but a broad basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope ignominious.

The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw on his head, when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s hat.”

Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind.

There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue.

Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence.

Poverty, the prison, the rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow-men, appear trials beyond the endurance of common humanity;

and we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men, detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary, and will die out.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade.

Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage.

There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo, which does not equally preach it.

Lord Brougham’s single duty of counsel is, “to get the prisoner clear.” Fuller says ’tis a maxim of lawyers, “that a crown once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof.”

Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès.

And we Americans are tainted with this insanity, as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our success takes from all what it gives to one. ’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.

Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès. And we Americans are tainted with this insanity, as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism.

Our success takes from all what it gives to one.

’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.

Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès. And we Americans are tainted with this insanity, as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our success takes from all what it gives to one.

’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.

… the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for success,—that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement, and take Michel Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be something of worth and value.”

Each man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat impossible to any other. Do your work.

I have to say this often, but nature says it oftener. ’Tis clownish to insist on doing all with one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house, forge his hammer, and bake his dough;

Yet, whilst this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say.

As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain-dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.

Any work looks wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names;

As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain-dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks wonderful to him, except that which he can do.

We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws.

The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the onus of an initiative.

but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, they cry, ‘It is the voice of God.’ Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, said to me of Robert Fulton’s visit to Paris: “

Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam, and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had excluded a greater power than his own.

”

The fame of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher, and not the inventor.

It is the dulness of the multitude that they cannot see the house, in the ground-plan; the working, in the model of the projector.

Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down; it is a chimera:

Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point, I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement which teaches him his own worth.

The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.

The good workman never says, ‘There, that will do’; but, ‘There, that is it: try it, and come again, it will last always.’

Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune accompanies him like a gift of God.”

Feel yourself, and be not daunted by things.

’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not that he borrows and gives.

We should know how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great,—only to have been translators of the happy present,—and every man and woman divine possibilities.

’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable.

’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer.

Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which the whole empire of matter is worked.

Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which the whole empire of matter is worked.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Is all life a surface affair? ’Tis curious, but our difference of wit appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions.

But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.

We live among gods of our own creation.

Does that deep-toned bell, which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing but acoustic vibrations?

The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new world of dream-like glory. ’Tis the last stroke of Nature; beyond color she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also.

If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow.

The hues of sunset make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.

’Tis the last stroke of Nature; beyond color she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow.

The hues of sunset make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.

The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that writes a record in the mind.

but to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us, we shall not think amiss.

Our perception far outruns our talent.

We bring a welcome to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be.

… present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption!

We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness.

The world is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities and potencies in those we have.

We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness.

The world is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities and potencies in those we have.

This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the faculties of youth, in the power which form and color exert upon the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race, features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said:

and if she says he was defeated, why he had better, a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment’s annoy.

Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.

And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in corners.

I was forced to reply: “No, next door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same house, was a greater man than any you had seen.”

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him.

Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,—to add to our high acquaintances.

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism.

Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors.

That is the great happiness of life,—to add to our high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is.

Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors.

That is the great happiness of life,—to add to our high acquaintances.

The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis of either;

The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these fine communications.

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness,—an open and noble temper.

There was never poet who had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, wrote,—

and what is the state of mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life?

A man is a man only as he makes life and nature happier to us.

I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love;

But we must begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day is great and final.

The night is for the day, but the day is not for the night.

What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth.

I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success.

One adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind.

We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art, to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day after the battle fit subjects for cabinet pictures.

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan.

Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop.

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions.

Nerve us with incessant affirmatives.

Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives.

Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;

Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody;

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception.

As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river.

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it.

Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river.

I have seen scores of people who can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto, Vasari tells us, renewed art, because he put more goodness into his heads.

To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action, that is the only aim.

’Tis cheap and easy to destroy.

There is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine.

We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great.

This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world.

A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”

this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world.

A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.”

And Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”

… and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers.

Wherever there is power, there is age.

Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Wherever there is power, there is age.

Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘I will enjoy myself for a few moments.’ Alas!

Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant.

We do not count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count.

The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous.

From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time.

This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science:

It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear.

The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home.

It were strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped.

What a lust of appearance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of this cumulative advantage in living.

All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps.

A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward reality.

and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted.

The throes continue until the child is born.

Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed.

What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors with complacency, but as one who, having long ago known these games, has refined them into results and morals.

The Indian Red Jacket, when the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, “But the sixties have all the twenties and forties in them.”

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts.

We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time.

Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last.

The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs;

But the time is not lost. Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted.

The best things are of secular growth.

The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes. His seventh class has not one.