The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him.We are then able t...
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasent. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicage; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. Bu...
Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.
Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.
[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of...
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
I will go forth as a real outlaw, he said, and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a towe...
Stop, stop, stop!' he cried; stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. . . Wi...
Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We...
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left-- sanity.
Far be it from a poor friar to deny that you have these dazzling diamonds in your head, all designed in the most perfect mathematical shapes and shining with a purely celestial light; all there, almos...
Of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.
If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the co...
The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt. There again, said Syme irritably, what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it...
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way...
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