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The great soul of this world is just.
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The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.
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The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
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A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
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Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is... Even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work!
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A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
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Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.
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It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defeats than to boast of our attainments.
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There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.
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A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
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Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
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Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
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Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
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"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."
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Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
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Society is founded upon Cloth.
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A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
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Woe to him, . . . who has no court of appeal against the world's judgment.
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No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.
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That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,-for we have no word to speak about it.
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Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!
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Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?
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Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy.
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All great peoples are conservative.