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Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.

— Isaac Watts

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Notes from Wikiquote

Compare: "I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man", Seneca, On a Happy Life (L'Estrange's Abstract), chap. i &: "It is the mind that makes the man, and our vigour is in our immortal soul", Attributed uncertainly to Ovid

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Spirituality

More quotes by Isaac Watts

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

Our God, our help in ages past (1719)

Joy to the world! the Saviour reigns;
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy.

Psalm 98 "Joy to the World! (1719)

And he that does one fault at first
And lies to hide it, makes it two.

Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

But, children, you should never let
Such angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear each other's eyes.

Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Isaac Watts (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.