328 quotes
The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.
Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
So here hath been dawning
Another blue Day:
Think wilt thou let it
Slip useless away.
Today (1840)
It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defects than to boast of our attainments.
We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.
He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of daily virtuous living.
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Unless some Hero-worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long.
Past and Present (1843)
Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
Sir Walter Scott (1838)
All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once.
A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading.
On The Choice Of Books (1866)
This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.
Reminiscences (1881)
Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
Heroes and Hero Worship (1840)
A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up.
History a distillation of Rumour.
The French Revolution. A History (1837)
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)