Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.
Virtue alone is sweet society, It keeps the key to all heroic hearts, And opens you a welcome in them all.
How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.
How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one
A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for 10 minutes longer.
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.
We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.
Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,--not only dust and stones, but errors and lies.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.
Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.
Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter half of the 19th Century is its SPEED
Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about.
Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
American Jews are no longer a homogenous minority; we come in all colors and from all corners of the world.
Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.
I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.
Religion contracts the circle of our pleasures, but leaves it wide enough for her votaries to expatiate in.
One of the most important but one of the most difficult things for a powerful mind is to be its own master.
Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet
In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water...
Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.
A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
The river knows the way to the sea: Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity.
The French woman says, 'I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human.'
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.
I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.
It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
Couldn't we even argue that it is because men are unequal that they have that much more need to be brothers?
Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!