 | Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth....
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| The key to every man is his thought.
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| Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series.
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| The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes
like an abyss of skepticism.
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| There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness.
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| Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in
him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise.
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| Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am
God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
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| For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.
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| Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation.
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| By going one step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled, by being
seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a
still higher vision.
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| Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at
risk.
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| Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank
turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
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| Conversation is a game of circles.
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| Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye
burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup
and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.
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| The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, -- property, climate,
breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strangely changed their proportions.
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| All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates,
religions, leave their foundations, and dance before our eyes.
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| Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it.
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| If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered
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| All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on
metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.
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| Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which
the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.
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| Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from
the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by
such an accident. Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you take against such an
evil, you put yourself into the power of the evil.
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| For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration
of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and
concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.
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| ...the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.
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| ....O circular philosopher, ....you have arrived at a fine
Pyrrhonism....
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| Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if
I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to
me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my
back.
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| That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought,
and contains all its circles.
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| Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and
spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and
old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names, --
fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they
are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. We
grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do
not grow old, but grow young.
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| But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope,
they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk down to the young.
Let them, then, become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold
truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with
hope and power.
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| Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by
oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be
trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as
they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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| Life is a series of surprises.
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| I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no
guess, for "so to be" is the sole inlet of "so to know."
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| The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all
new.
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| The simplest words, -- we do not know what they mean, except when we love and aspire.
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| True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear, as an early cloud of
insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.
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| Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is
by abandonment.
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| Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit
of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. |
