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It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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A great man is always willing to be little.
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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
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One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
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Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.
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A mollusk is a cheap edition of man with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
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Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
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Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
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As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
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The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
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Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
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You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
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It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
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I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
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The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.