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Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
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Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!
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The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.
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Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.
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In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
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Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
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Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
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Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.
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History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
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True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
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Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
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So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.
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France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.
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The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world.
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The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.
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Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.
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He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.
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It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
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There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
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One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
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Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.
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Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
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Man's earthly interests,'are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.
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It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.