Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.
All diseases run into one, old age.
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.
The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.
Without electricity, the air would rot.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
