quotes from classic

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

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What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies with in us.

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We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, i...

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Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

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I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to...

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Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

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We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing

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Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

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In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, beca...

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It is not length of life, but depth of life. Life

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It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fa...

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Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written...

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A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.

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We might as easily reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their...

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What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for the ages has signified cunning, intima...

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We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

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The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

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Freedom's secret wilt thou know?— Counsel not with flesh and blood;...

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Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

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The Religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

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