There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear.
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education oftenlabors to silence and obstruct.
When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.