And man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell.

Evil and good are everywhere, like shadow and substance; inseparable (for men) yet not hostile, only opposed.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

I call that [Book of Job], apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them: only small mean souls are otherwise.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

The nobleness of silence. The highest melody dwells only in silence,--the sphere melody, the melody of health.

There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay's, and mere words.

Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk.

Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be,-insincerity, unbelief.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin.

Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.

Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.

Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but then centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.

Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

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