11 quotes
As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)
A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)
The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)
Reputation is but a synonyme of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)
I have more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the worldwide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism.
Piety in art—poetry in art—Puseyism in art—let us be careful how we confound them.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)
He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)
Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals —
The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)
Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise: it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate it in silence.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)
Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.
Memoirs and Essays (1846)