Every artist was first an amateur.
So far as a person thinks; they are free.
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.
Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.
Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.
Life too near paralyses art.
The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.
Whatever limits us we call fate.
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