Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.
Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.
What really gets me is this - it's very ironic that those who are most critical of extra tax are those who are most vociferous in demanding extra expenditure. What gets me even more is that having demanded that extra expenditure they are not prepared to face the consequences of their own action and stand by the necessity to get the tax to pay for it. I wish some of them had a bit more guts and courage than they have.
It is my fondest wish that in the fullness of time, the American people will look back on the Franken presidency as something of a mixed bag and not as a complete disaster.
For what is time? ... Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? ... If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.
With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.
We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it.
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.