328 quotes
A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.
Efforts to be permanently useful must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright.
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)
One life;—a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.
Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.
High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.
The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Thought once awakened does not again slumber.
Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)
Creation is great, and cannot be understood.
Speech is great; but silence is greater.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
address at Edinburgh (1866)
Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?
Dupes indeed are many: but, of all dupes, there is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
Past and Present (1843)
Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!
To the very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.
Sir Walter Scott (1838)
It can be said of him, When he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much to the satisfaction of the people.
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850)
There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.