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self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.
our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more.
sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids
fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers.
so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered.
a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food,
He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.
the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.
“All things have two handles: Beware of the wrong one.”
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless.
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running underground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind?
nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind.
the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.
Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,—learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,—by considering their value alone.
It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts.
men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.
the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said.
When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant,
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.
The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake.
The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.
experience is converted into thought,
Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.
In its grub state it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom.
Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions.
When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness,—he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
