''Let us only hate hatred; and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.''
''If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.''
''That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.''
''In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.''
''They were in the jelly of youth.''
''Though gilded and golden, the serpent of vice is a serpent still.''
''Praise when merited is not a boon: yet to a generous nature, is it pleasant to utter it.''
''This were to be truly immortal;Mto be perpetuated in our works, and not in our names.''
''Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to."''
''Man lording it over man, man kneeling to man, is a spectacle that Gabriel might well travel hitherward to behold; for never did he behold it in heaven.''
''Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.''
''Peradventure at this instant, there are beings gazing up to this very world as their future heaven.''
''I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.''
''All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.''
''This country is at present engaged in furnishing material for future authors; not in encouraging its living ones.''
''He who goes oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.''
''Death my lord!—it is the deadest of all things.''
''Treacherous plague-spots of indigence—videlicet, blots from the inkstand.''
''It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.''
''Humanity cries out against this vast enormity:Mnot one man knows a prudent remedy. Blame not, then, the North; and wisely judge the South.''
''As well hate a seraph, as a shark.''
''He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.''
''That greatest real miracle of all religions, the Sermon on the Mount.''
''Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses,—for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it,—not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.''
''On the threshold of any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise, the thousand ulterior intricacies and emperilings to which it must conduct; these, at the outset, are mostly withheld from sight.''
''The knave of a thousand years ago seems a fine old fellow full of spirit and fun, little malice in his soul; whereas, the knave of to-day seems a sour-visaged wight, with nothing to redeem him.''
''To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.''
''The incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness ...''
''Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.''
''All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.''
''all mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners—miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.''
''Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.''
''Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.''
''All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.''
''The retaliation is apt to be in monstrous disproportion to the supposed offense; for when in anybody was revenge in its exactions aught else but an inordinate usurer?''
''To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith.''
''Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.''
''In things abstract, men but differ in the sounds that come from their mouths, and not in the wordless thoughts lying at the bottom of their beings.''
''Vivenza was a braggadocio in Mardi; the only brave one ever known.''
''That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.''
''The two great things yet to be discovered are these—The Art of rejuvenating old age in men, & oldageifying youth in books.—Who in the name of the trunk-makers would think of reading Old Burton were his book published for the first to day.''
''There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fancied superiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.''
''To study the stars upon the wide, boundless sea, is divine as it was to the Chaldean Magi, who observed their revolutions from the plains.''
''So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.''
''Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.''
''There is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable.''
''Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.''
''Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.''
''Niggards are oftentimes neat.''
''tea, a decoction that enlarges the spleen and warpest the brain, or lightly floating the spirit for a while at last lands it in a dry place.''
''The most mighty of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.''
''Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.''
''There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.''
''This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last.''
''A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.''
''One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.''
''As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.''
''The rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.''
''Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.''
''Backward and forward, eternity is the same; already we have been the nothing we dread to be.''
''Unsophisticated and confiding, they are easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the ruin thus remorselessly inflicted upon them by their European civilizers.''
''To an immature nature essentially honest and humane, forewarning intimations of subtler danger from one's kind come tardily if at all.''
''Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.''
''Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent any thing but—happiness.''
''We are idiot, younger-sons of gods, begotten in dotages divine; and our mothers all miscarry.''
''One would like to know, what were foes made for except to be used?''
''A king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.''
''Charge a man with one misdemeanor, and all his peccadilloes are raked up and assorted before him.''
''There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.''
''To certain temperaments, especially when previously agitated by any deep feeling, there is perhaps nothing more exasperating, and which sooner explodes all self-command, than the coarse, jeering insolence of a porter, cabman, or hack-driver.''
''To be the subject of alms-giving is trying, and to feel in duty bound to appear cheerfully grateful under the trial, must be still more so.''
''There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.''
''In a multitude of acquaintances is less security, than in one faithful friend.''
''If a drunkard in a sober fit is the dullest of mortals, an enthusiast in a reason-fit is not the most lively.''
''A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.''
''Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?''
''Talk to me not of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.''
''Are twelve wise men more wise than one? or will twelve fools, put together, make one sage? Are twelve honest men more honest than one?''
''We die of too much life.''
''All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.''
''If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.''
''Something further may follow of this Masquerade.''
''Here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.''
''The god Janus never had two more decidedly different faces than your sea captain.''
''We die, because we live.''
''Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.''
''A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.''
''Strange, how the coolest valour may go along with a hot brain-pan.''
''The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,—simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.''
''Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?''
''It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.''
''It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.''
''Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.''
''Cripples, above all men, should be companionable, or, at least, refrain from picking a fellow-limper to pieces.''
''Deeper and deeper into Time's endless tunnel, does the winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.''
''It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.''
''A laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.''
''The scythe that advances forever and never needs whetting.''
''In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.''
''To be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism; and this, perhaps, springs from the virtue of a vote.''
''Of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.''
''Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden,—what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!''
''The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carried off a million years ago.''
''You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.''
''Amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.''
''Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.''
''The world's a ship on its voyage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.''
''Old Abe is much better looking than I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.''
''In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself.''
''I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.''
''Vivenza might be likened to St. John, feeding on locusts and wild honey, and with prophetic voice, crying to the nations from the wilderness.''
''As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.''
''If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.''
''Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.''
''Never joke at funerals, or during business transactions.''
''Behold here the fate of a sailor! They give him the last toss, and no one asks whose child he was.''
''The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.''
''Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?''
''Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.''
''We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.''
''All the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.''
''The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and where these principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind.''
''There is sorrow in the world, but goodness too; and goodness that is not greenness, either, no more than sorrow is.''
''Thus—thanks to the world!—are there many spies in the world's camp, who are mistaken for strolling simpletons.''
''Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.''
''Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises ... the best excellence in the children of any other land.''
''Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse, and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.''
''Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.''
''There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.''
''The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be.''
''Oh Conventionalism, what a ninny, thou art, to be sure.''
''Great towers take time to construct.''
''"what has cast such a shadow upon you" "The negro."''
''What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?''
''He is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening our natural sight, thus enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance.''
''Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.''
''There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.''
''We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.''
''Meditation and water are wedded for ever.''
''When a companion's heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing.''
''Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.''
''There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.''
''I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.''
''Of the quaking recruit, three pitched battles make a grim grenadier; and he who shrank from the muzzle of a cannon, is now ready to yield his mustache for a sponge.''
''To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.''
''Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.''
''Juxtaposition marries men.''
''Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.''
''flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.''
''A ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king.''
''The scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.''
''Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?''
''The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.''
''After science comes sentiment.''
''Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.''
''At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.''
''I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.''
''There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.''
''In some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.''
''So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to "fail."''
''In tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;Mnevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.''
''The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind; but not the march of Love.''
''Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.''
''Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.''
''Coke and Blackstone hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets.''
''I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will.''
''man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.''
''It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.''
''There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.''
''Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.''
''Better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.''
''We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.''
''As for the possible hereafter of the whales; a creature eighty feet long without stockings, and thirty feet round the waist before dinner, is not inconsiderately to be consigned to annihilation.''
''He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,—it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.''
''Murder is catching.''
''Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.''
''Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.''
''We talk of the Turks, and abhor the cannibals; but may not some of them, go to heaven, before some of us?''
''Dissenters only assent to more than we.''
''For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.''
''How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.''
''Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant.''
''A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.''
''Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.''
''Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.''
''I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.''
''If not against us, nature is not for us.''
''The strong arm, my lord, is no argument, though it overcomes all logic.''
''Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.''
''Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.''
''Eternity is not ours by right; and, alone, unrequited sufferings here, form no title thereto.''
''Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.''
''In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.''
''Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man knows the steel; prate not to him that it is only a ticking feather.''
''Say what they will of the glowing independence one feels in the saddle, give me the first morning flush of your cheery pedestrian!''
''Man was not made to succumb to the villain Woe.''
''What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?''
''Were civilization itself to be measured by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.''
''I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.''
''The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.''
''Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.''
''A beautiful woman is born Queen of men and women both, as Mary Stuart was born Queen of Scots, whether men or women.''
''If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.''
''In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object.''
''To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.''
''Come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.''
''Your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself.''
''When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?''
''The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.''
''Man, "poor player," succeeds better in life's tragedy than comedy.''
''In the case of pirates, say, I would like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows.''
''If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.''
''Pyramids still loom before me—something vast, indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful.''
''His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity, whensoever possible, with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.''
''Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.''
''Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled.''
''After many centuries, those crescents yet unwaning shine, and count a devotee for every worshiper of yonder crosses. Truth and Merit have other symbols than success.''
''Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.''
''We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.''
''There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.''
''Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.''
''All truth is profound.''
''War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.''
''The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.''
''contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.''
''These South savannahs may yet prove battle-fields.''
''Truth is in things, and not in words.''
''The women, who had congregated in the groves, set up the most violent clamors, as they invariably do here as elsewhere on every occasion of excitement and alarm, with a view of tranquilizing their own minds and disturbing other people.''
''Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.''
''The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.''
''There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.''
''Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round.''
''Oh, men are jailers all; jailers of themselves; and in Opinion's world ignorantly hold their noblest part a captive to their vilest.''
''The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.''
'''Tis no dishonor when he who would dishonor you, only dishonors himself.''
''Madam, or sir, would you visit on the butterfly the sins of the caterpillar?''
''While nature thus very early and very abundantly feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper methodization of our diet.''
''There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.''
''When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.''
''If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.''
''Yet, rather, are we scabbards to our souls. And the drawn sword of genius is more glittering than the drawn cimeter of Saladin.''
''Men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its merely worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they care little of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.''
''There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.''
''The Navy is the asylum for the perverse, the home of the unfortunate. Here the sons of adversity meet the children of calamity, and here the children of calamity meet the offspring of sin.''
''The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.''
''Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.''
''I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person.''
''It is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;Mthese are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.''
''There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear—the city of London and the South Seas.''
''Those Three Weird Ones, that tend Life's loom.''
''I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.''
''Man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.''
''It is plain and demonstrable, that much ale is not good for Yankee, and operates differently upon them from what it does upon a Briton; ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.''
''Oath and anchors equally will drag; nought else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.''
''His memory is like wares at the auction—going, going, and anon it will be gone.''
''Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.''
''Like all high functionaries, he deemed it indispensable religiously to sustain his dignity; one of the most troublesome things in the world, and one calling for the greatest self-denial.''
''Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.''
''The public is one thing, Jack, and the people another.''
''Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.''
''It is against the will of God that the East should be Christianized.''
''It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.''
''All objects look well through an arch.''
''The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?''
''The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.''
''Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.''
''Bless my soul, Sir, will you Britons not credit that an American can be a gentleman, & have read the Waverly Novels, tho every digit may have been in the tar-bucket?''
''Indolence is heaven's ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.''
''Were they to emigrate in a body to man the navies of the moon, almost every thing would stop here on earth except its revolution on its axis, and the orators in the American Congress.''
''The only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible.''
''The remnant of Indians thereabout—all but exterminated in their recent and final war with regular white troops, a war waged by the Red Men for their native soil and natural rights—had been coerced into the occupancy of wilds not far beyond the Mississippi.''
''The pleasure of leaving home, care-free, with no concern but to enjoy, has also as a pendant the pleasure of coming back to the old hearthstone, the home to which, however traveled, the heart still fondly turns, ignoring the burden of its anxieties and cares.''
''Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.''
''The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.''
''Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.''
''Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.''
''St Louis, that city of outward-bound caravans for the West, and which is to the prairies, what Cairo is to the Desert.''
''Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.''
''Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.''
'''Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders. To expire, mild-eyed, in one's bed, transcends the death of Epaminondas.''
''Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.''
''beauty is like piety—you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.''
''The dinner-hour is the summer of the day: full of sunshine, I grant; but not like the mellow autumn of supper.''
''Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.''
''We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.''
''The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself—who according to the Rabbins was also the first author—not being an original; the only original author being God.''
''A thorough tar is unfit for any thing else; and what is more, this fact is the best evidence of his being a true sailor.''
''Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure.''
