As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.Collection: Laughter
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.Collection: Inspirational
Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.Collection: Happiness
Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.Collection: Giants
Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.Collection: Unexpected
Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.Collection: Real
The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in.Collection: Perseverance
A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.Collection: Character
The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.Collection: Beauty
Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.Collection: Soul
Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.Collection: Sides
The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.Collection: Inspirational
True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.Collection: Wise
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.Collection: Passion
God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.Collection: Thanksgiving
The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions.Collection: Party
Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.Collection: Patents
Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.Collection: Perseverance
No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.Collection: Song
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.Collection: Kings
The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.Collection: Character
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.Collection: Cheer
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.Collection: Eulogy
Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.Collection: Use
A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.Collection: Imagination
From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.Collection: Light
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.Collection: Irony
Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.Collection: Genius
A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.Collection: Two
There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.Collection: Men
Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.Collection: Beautiful
What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.Collection: Men
Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.Collection: Bridges
Heroism is no extempore work of transient impulse--a rocket rushing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, after a moment's insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly swallowed up,--but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of action, but a luminous epic of character.Collection: Character
The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.Collection: Criticism
The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church.Collection: Brain
Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.Collection: Spiritual
God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.Collection: Heart
Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.Collection: Genius
Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.Collection: Heart
A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns or expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression; but words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring.Collection: Memories
Sydney Smith playfully says that common sense was invented by Socrates, that philosopher having been one of its most conspicuous exemplars in conducting the contest of practical sagacity against stupid prejudice and illusory beliefs.Collection: Stupid
In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.Collection: Air
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.Collection: Political
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.Collection: Mouths
Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.Collection: Style
Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?Collection: Eye
Knowledge, like religion, must be experienced in order to be known.Collection: Knowledge
The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.Collection: Greatness
We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.Collection: Men