The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
The merit of originality is not novelty, it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; he believes for himself, not for another.
If they could forget for a moment the correggiosity of Correggio and the learned babble of the sale-room and varnishing Auctioneer.
The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
Before philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded.
Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my timeâthis art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.
Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
A Poet without Love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
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!
He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
His religion at best is an anxious wish,--like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
On the whole we must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion; or with any other feeling than regret, and hope, and brotherly commiseration.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
Ridicule is the language of the devil.
Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his. [Fr., Moi, je serai autocrate: c'est mon metier. Et le bon Dieu me pardonnnera: c'est son metier.]