quotes by Scholar Quotes

“If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”

“Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.”

“The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.”

“Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.”

“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.”

“I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.”

“My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.”

“All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.”

“Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but enjoyed.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.”

“The great theatre for virtue is conscience.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.”

“Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.”

“Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.”

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory”

“Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven - of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best.”

“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”

“The house is a castle which the King cannot enter.”

“Life is our dictionary.”

“Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.”

“When confronted by a hungry wolf, it is unwise to goad the beast, as Cato would have us do. But it is equally unwise to imagine the snarling animal a friend and offer your hand, as Pompey does." "Perhaps you would have us climb a tree!”

“If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“The street is full of humiliations to the proud.”

“There is properly no history, only biography.”

“The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.”

“The greatest genius is the most indebted person.”

“The true poem is the poet's mind.”

“When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.”

“Charity is the form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues.”

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

“Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.”

“The office of liberality consisteth in giving with judgment.”

“The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”

“Most people, who have quit smoking, have had at least one unsuccessful try in the past. It is not important how many times you try to quit. The only important thing is, that eventually you stay quit”

“A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.”

“As soon as there is life there is danger.”

“I depart from life as from an inn, and not as from my home.[Lat., Ex vita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo.]”

“For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

“The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.”

“Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.”

“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

“Hence, the less government we have, the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formalGovernment, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.”

“A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages”

“To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story.”

“Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.”