Representative Men

„The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.”

„The search after the great is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.”

„The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men.”

„Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.”

„I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”

„A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within, outward.”

„It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest—"Peu de moyens, beaucoup d'effet." He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.”

„The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us.”

„Serving others is serving us.”

„Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing its lover and poet.”

„The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed.”

„Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told.”

„This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition”

„We must extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring a new planet.”

„Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "you must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." Talk much with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we anticipate his thought.”

„all mental and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or not, and profits me whom you never thought of.”

„Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald.”

„The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.”

„nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change.”

„We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes;”

„When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.”

„Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature,—admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool's cap too long.”

„With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers.”

„I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good, without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.”

„I find him greater, when he can abolish himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great, that the potentate is nothing.”

„Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world point their finger at it every day.”

„Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses.”

„Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which Thersites too can love and admire.”

„We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion. Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works.”

„The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries, what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take another step.”

„A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.”

„Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help:—other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

„We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.”

„There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote "Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.”

„For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against every other. Each is self-defended.”

„Presently, a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought, and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their independence.”

„The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we must have society.”

„We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long the best company for each other.”

„great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself.”

„All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere”

„The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.”

„The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men,—their spirit diffuses itself.”

„Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world.”

„But, at last, we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him an original force.”

„Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos;”

„There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.”

„Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind.”

„Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

„Every man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.”

„Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.”

„As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.”

„If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.”

„“He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define." - Plato This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world.”

„Men contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance.”

„The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one's own, and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things”

„Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect; one is necessity; the other, freedom; one, rest; the other, motion; one, power; the other, distribution; one, strength; the other, pleasure; one, consciousness; the other, definition; one, genius; the other, talent, one, earnestness; the other, knowledge; one, possession; the other, trade; one, caste; the other, culture; one king; the other, democracy; and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization,—pure science; and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or executive deity.”

„If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.”

„Plato, in Egypt, and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed.”

„It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls, is because they are not in our experience.”

„No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.”

„He is a great average man one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they are.”

„Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond.”

„The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend the whole; or that which in the diversity of sensations, can be comprised under a rational unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.”

„for courage is nothing else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own”

„valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.”

„Socrates declares that, if some have grown wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him, they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way of it”

„Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings.”

„The strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato.”

„the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.”

„The way to know him, is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men.”

„The criticism is like our impatience of miles when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.”

„Plato affirms the coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue; but virtue knows both itself and vice.”

„a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune, is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man;”

„He was born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things. Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas.”

„the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real”

„Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in nature; man is the microcosm.”

„Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom”

„If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge.”

„All men are commanded by the saint.”

„what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine.”

„A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm.”

„the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity.”

„nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes”

„We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.”

„If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.”

„In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system.”

„The world has a sure chemistry, by which it attracts what is excellent in its children, and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.”

„All things in the universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. As he is, so he sees.”

„We have come into a world which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of death, and cannot remember that they have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others.”

„The perfection of man is the love of use:" "Man, in his perfect form, is heaven:" "What is from Him, is Him:" "Ends always ascend as nature descends:”

„Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other fellowships of joy.”

„Every thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on.”

„My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my eyes, and not of another man's.”

„Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.”

„The less we have to do with our sins, the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions.”

„That pure malignity can exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation. Euripides rightly said,— "Goodness and being in the gods are one; He who imputes ill to them makes them none.”

„Indian Vishnu,-"I am the same to all mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration,—I am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil, serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth eternal happiness.”

„Socrates' Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said, "I know not; what he is not I know. The Hindoos have denominated the Supreme Being, the "Internal Check”

„A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes me one.”

„Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature; others are forever prevented from ascending out of it.”

„Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage and main chance of men; nothing can keep you,—not fate, nor health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only, rectitude forever and ever!”

„Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to morals.”

„The nerves," says Cabanis, "they are the man.”

„Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature.”

„Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.”

„Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.”

„We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line”

„The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.”

„Society does not like to have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.”

„Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.”

„I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that, though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.”

„fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved mind”

„Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions?”

„we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his method is illusion.”

„The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life.”

„The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment.”

„Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to the common discourse of their company.”

„Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.”

„A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe, that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.”

„Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned to his destinies;" in other words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds”

„Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. “We see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams. Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal cause.— "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea.”

„Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.”

„The greatest genius is the most indebted man.”

„The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.”

„Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

„We have few readers, many spectators and hearers.”

„Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it.”

„Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.”

„As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,—all perished,—which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.”

„All the debt which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some translation existing.”

„Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.”

„Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.”

„We are very clumsy writers of history.”

„Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations.”

„A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors.”

„Epicurus relates, that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them.”

„Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfections of humanity”

„For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.”

„It is Swedenborg's theory, that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or, as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.”

„To be the rich man is the end. "God has granted" says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit of commerce, of money, and material power, were also to have their prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent.”

„Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men.”

„the desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.”

„An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, "if you would succeed, you must not be too good.”

„My son cannot replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances.”

„Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse from abroad.”

„Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me.”

„During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not wake me when you have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost." [about Napoleon]“He directed Bourienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer required an answer”

„Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so had the key to citizenship.”

„The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of the common people.”

„Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and found none. "Good God!" he said, "how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two,—Dandolo and Melzi.”

„Seventeen men, in his time, were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connection.”

„as intellectual beings, we feel the air purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies.”

„I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people's.”

„What creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the land commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries, he will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail.”

„In all battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confidence in their own courage; and it only requires a slight opportunity, a pretense, to restore confidence to them. The art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to invent the pretense. At Arcola, I won the battle with twentyfive horsemen. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies which meet, and endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty; it is as easy as casting up an addition.”

„life is a fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defense? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are the chief articles in my pharmacopeia.”

„he sat, in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to history, a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect.”

„A great reputation is a great noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.”

„In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.”

„The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.”

„Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed, and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away, like the smoke of his artillery and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again.”

„It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay, to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world, which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.”

„Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history.”

„In man, the memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a new order.”

„The man cooperates. He loves to communicate; and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation, some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born to write.”

„some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.”

„When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;”

„Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds them to its perfect will, and is articulated.”

„There are higher degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments for those whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of things turns”

„The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish, with other men, to stand well with his contemporaries”

„Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defense of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.”

„That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative and the practical doctrines are one”

„For great action must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstances. This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior persons. The robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical class, share the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy with the speculative class.”

„Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.”

„Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. “And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns; the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldean oracles; Laconian sentences inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity, and without choice. Every word was carved, before his eyes, into the earth and sky; and the sun and stars were only letters of the same purport; and of no more necessity. But how can he be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government, or must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write conventional criticism, or profligate novels; or, at any rate, write without thought, and without recurrence, by day and night, to the sources of inspiration?”

„We conceive Greek or Roman life,—life in the middle ages—to be a simple and comprehensive affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is distracting.”

„I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what he knows.”

„Eyes are better, on the whole, than telescopes or microscopes.”

„The plant goes from knot to knot, closing, at last, with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes with the head. Men and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the head.”

„I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust?”

„I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.”

„Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist, and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind—the burden of truth to be declared,—more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world, to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that this method or his tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak. If not,—if there be no such God's word in the man,—what care we how adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is?”

„Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom.”

„Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be his portion; a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of a stoical self- command and self-denial, and having one test for all men,—What can you teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank, privileges, health”

„Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture.”

„He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too much”

„a man exists for culture; not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him.”

„An intellectual man can see himself as a third person; therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success.”

„All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted and sickly, that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live”

„It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures: the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme.”

„The world is young; the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.”

„I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods. “A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.”

„We have come into a world which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. “The perfection of man is the love of use:" "Man, in his perfect form, is heaven:" "What is from Him, is Him:" "Ends always ascend as nature descends:”

„He directed Bourienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer required an answer”