What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
The most fearful unbelief is unbelief in your self.
Thomas Carlyle
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are. It shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Thought is the parent of the deed.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated reading deserves to be read at all.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
Variety is the condition of harmony.
No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
No man sees far, most see no farther than their noses.
I have seen gleams in the face and eyes of the man that have let you look into a higher country.
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.
Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.
The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
Wonder is the basis of worship.
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.
Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.
Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance.
Benjamin Franklin
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