Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of--the air!
The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can.
The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.
All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.
Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.
O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!
How, without clothes, could we possess the master organ, soul's seat and true pineal gland of the body social--I mean a purse?
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.
Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?
The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.
The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.
No country can find eternal peace and comfort where the vote of Judas Iscariot is as good as the vote of the Saviour of mankind.
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.
The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than all stars; deeper than the Kingdom of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.