New arts destroy the old.
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
The most dangerous thing is illusion.
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.
One of the illusions of life 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.
Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.
It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
