Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Progress is seldom simple; it comes with costs and casualties, even challenges about whether a change represents an advance or a retreat.
It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.
The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.
I'm one of those perverse people who likes being alone. I always took myself to be a community of one. That's what I am comfortable with.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
People only see what they are prepared to see. If you look for what is good and what you can be grateful for you will find it everywhere.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
Strange is this alien despotism of Sleep which takes two persons lying in each other's arms & separates them leagues, continents,asunder.
The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations.
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose.
I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.
It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.
There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together.
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.
...in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in the streets or villages...in the woods we return to reason and faith.
Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.
It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.
The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.
It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
The women in my family - my grandmother and my mother - have been both sources of comfort and terror. Protection was not always available.
Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.
Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.
When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, ´there is no god´.
Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.