Essayist Quotes

“All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.”

“A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.”

“Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.”

“What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.”

“We are the prisoners of ideas.”

“The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means friendly.”

“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”

“The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' ... There is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball.”

“I like to have a person's knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a person who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.”

“We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.”

“A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.”

“Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.”

“The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”

“Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.”

“The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.”

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.”

“Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.”

“We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.”

“The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?”

“Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.”

“The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.”

“The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.”

“Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.”

“Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”