The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. |
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is -- Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. |
The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other. |
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. |
The less America looks abroad, the grander its promise |
The less government we have the better. |
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. |
The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy. |
The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. |
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. |
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. |
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. |
The majority of men are bundles of beginnings |
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. |
The man for whom the law exists -- the man of forms, the conservative -- is a tame man. |