Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? in the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?
A spirit of criticism, if indulged in, leads to a censoriousness of disposition that is destructive of all nobler feeling. The man who lives to find faults has a miserable mission.
All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days That are no more, and shall no more return. Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed; I stay a little longer, as one stays To cover up the embers that still burn.
A stiff letter galls one like a stiff shirt collar -- whilst a sheet garnished here and there with a careless blot -- and here and there a dash -- but in the main full of excellent matter, is like a clever fellow in a dirty shirt whom we value for the good humour he brings with him and not for the garb he wears.
One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm For the country folk to be up and to arm.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
For in the night, unseen, a single warrior, In sombre harness mailed, Dreaded of man, and surnamed the Destroyer, The rampart wall has scaled. He passed into the chamber of the sleeper, The dark and silent room, And as he entered, darker grew, and deeper, The silence and the gloom.
How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul. The intellect of man is enthroned visibly on his forehead and in his eye, and the heart of man is written on his countenance, but the soul, the soul reveals itself in the voice only.
As Unto the bow the the cord is , So unto the man is woman; Though she bends him, she obeys him, Though she draws him , yet she follows: Useless each without the other.