It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.--_George Eliot._
Man is one name belonging to every nation upon earth. In them all is one soul though many tongues. Every country has its own language, yet the subjects of which the untutored soul speaks are the same everywhere.
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
Worlds gravitate in the midst of their own elements. The yellow or yolk of an egg remains in the middle of the albumen without moving on either side, and is lighter or heavier or equal to this albumen; and if it is lighter it ought to rise above all the albumen and stop in contact with the shell of the egg; and if it is heavier it ought {161} to sink; and if it is equal to it, it can stand at one of the ends as well as in the centre or below.
Every one thinks his own burden the heaviest.
Castrant alios, ut libros suos, per se graciles, alieno adipe suffarciant=--They castrate the books of others, that they may stuff their own naturally lean ones with their fat.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own.
"Now in the latter time of their kingdom when iniquities shall be grown up, there shall arise a king insolent and strong, but his power shall be not his own. To him all things shall succeed after his will, and he shall destroy the holy people, and through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand, and he shall destroy many. He shall also stand up against the Prince of Princes, but he shall perish miserably, and nevertheless by a violent hand."
Many of the faults and mistakes of the ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew no language but their own, and were often led into confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied.
Let every man come to God in his own way.
He who comes up to his own ideal of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
Judice te mercede caret, per seque petenda est / Externis virtus incomitata bonis=--In your judgment virtue needs no reward, and is to be sought for her own sake, unaccompanied by external benefits.
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
God, who loves us enough to sacrifice his Son for our redemption, works so that we would see ourselves clearly, so that we would not buy into the delusion of our own righteousness, and so that with a humble sense of personal need we would seek the resources of grace that can only be found in him.
It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.
Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries.--_Tyndall._
'T is elder Scripture, writ by God's own hand,-- Scripture authentic! uncorrupt by man.
man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.
Labour, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.
Life lies before us as a huge quarry before the architect; and he deserves not the name of architect except when, out of this fortuitous mass, he can combine, with the greatest economy, fitness and durability, some form the pattern of which originated in his own soul.
Much of the pleasure, and all the benefit of conversation, depends upon our own opinion of the speaker's veracity.
Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth that beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, have no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock.
It is a foul bird that dirties its own nest.
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will; Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine own so proper as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use.
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise.
The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd As home his footsteps he hath turn'd From wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well! For him no minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,-- Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.[488-2]
It would be a new thing in history if _a priori_ philosophers were daunted by the factious opposition of experience; and the Stoics were the last men to allow themselves to be beaten by mere facts. "Give me a doctrine and I will find the reasons for it," said Chrysippus. So they perfected, if they did not invent, that ingenious and plausible form of pleading, the Theodicy; for the purpose of showing firstly, that there is no such thing as evil; secondly, that if there is, it is the necessary correlate of good; and, moreover, that it is either due to our own fault, or inflicted for our benefit.
In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauperism have nothing to do with heredity; but are the consequence, partly, of circumstances and, partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under different conditions of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration. It was a shrewd man of the world who, in discussing sewage problems, remarked that dirt is riches in the wrong; place; and that sound aphorism has moral applications. The benevolence and open-handed generosity which adorn a rich man may make a pauper of a poor one; the energy and courage to which the successful soldier owes his rise, the cool and daring subtlety to which the great financier owes his fortune, may very easily, under unfavourable conditions, lead their possessors to the gallows, or to the hulks. Moreover, it is fairly probable that the children of a "failure" will receive from their other parent just that little modification of character which makes all the difference. I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be very "fit" indeed not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the "unfit."
We must adopt reforms which will expand the range of opportunities for all Americans. We can fulfill the American dream only when each person has a fair chance to fulfill his own dreams. This means equal voting rights, equal employment opportunity and new opportunities for expanded ownership, because in order to be secure in their human rights, people need access to property rights. [ 1970 State of the Union Message to the Congress , January 22, 1970]
Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality.
That the covetous wants that which he has, as well as that which he has not; because he is master of nothing, and is the slave of his own wealth.
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children. [ Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Road to Socialism by Maurice Isserman in Civil Rights to Human Rights; Martin Luther King, Jr. , and The Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006; In King’s Own Words , from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson’s book.]
I know exactly what my future looks like and I'm okay with it. I'm happy to live in solitude. I'm not afraid of spending the rest of my life in the company of my own person. I do not afraid loneliness.
What you can manufacture, or communicate, you can lower the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can generally do is--to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal.--_Ruskin._
No one gets into trouble without his own help.
To be a member, is to have neither life, being, nor movement save by the spirit of the body, and for the body; the separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only a waning and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self and wills to constitute itself both centre and body. But not having in itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in the uncertainty of its being; fully aware that it is not a body, yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Then when at last it arrives at the knowledge of self, it has returned as it were to its own home, and loves itself only for the body's sake, bewailing that in the past it has gone astray.
Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises.
Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its core and its own general wants.
Un viaggiatore prudente non disprezza mai il suo paese=--A wise traveller never depreciates his own country.
If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse....I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist.
Neither our virtues nor vices are all our own.
Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but gold and silver will pass all the world over, without any other recommendation than their own weight.
Nobody will use other people's experience, nor has any of his own till it is too late to use it.
I let every one follow his own bent, that I may be free to follow mine.
If I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have said enough to serve mine own turn.
Suppose two persons tell foolish stories, one whose words have a two-fold sense, understood only by his own followers, the other which has only the one sense, a stranger not being in the secret, who hears them both speak in this manner, would pass on them a like judgment. But if afterwards in the rest of their conversation one speak with the tongue of angels, and the other mere wearisome common-places, he will judge that the one spoke in mysteries and not the other; the one having sufficiently shown that he was incapable of absurdity, and capable of being mysterious, the other that he is incapable of mystery, and capable of absurdity.
The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary.
He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.
Eat at your own table as you would eat at the table of the king.
Every man shall bear his own burden.
We want to create puppets that pull their own strings.
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way.
The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
He frieth in his own grease.
In analyzing the character of heroes it is hardly possible to separate altogether the share of Fortune from their own.--_Hallam._
There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.
Most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
Mon ame a son secret, ma vie a son mystere=--My soul has a secret of its own, my life its mystery.
Then it is said, Is not Christ God? Yes, He is, but in His own sense, not in the Jewish nor in the Greek sense, nor in the sense which so many Christians attach to that article of their faith. Christ's teaching is that we are of God, that there is in us something divine, that we are nothing if we are not that. He also teaches that through our own fault we are now widely separated from God, as a son may be entirely separated and alienated from his father. But God is a perfect and loving Father--He knows that we can be weak, and yet be good, and when His lost sons return to Him He receives them and forgives them as only a father can forgive. Let us bestow all praise and glory on Christ as the best son of God. Let us feel how unworthy we are to be called His brothers, and the children of God, but let us not lose Christ, and lose our Father whom He came to show us, by exalting Jesus beyond the place which He claimed Himself. Christ never calls Himself the Father, He speaks of His Father with love, but always with humility and reverence. All attempts to find in human language a better expression than that of son have failed. Theologians and philosophers have tried in vain to define more accurately the relation of Christ to the Father, of man to God. They have called Christ another person of the Godhead. Is that better than Christ's own simple human language, I go to my Father?
So well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
on a good path, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself.
but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience.
The mind can make / Substance, and people planets of its own / With beings brighter than have been, and give / A breath to forms that can outlive all flesh.
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
he was already fifty years old, the age at which an intelligent and worldly man of means always becomes more respectful of himself, sometimes even against his own will.
We easily dispense with what was never our own.
A great spirit errs as well as a little one, the former because it knows no bounds, the latter because it confounds its own horizon with that of the universe.
A chaque fou plait sa marotte=--Every fool is pleased with his own hobby.
Chaque potier vante sa pot=--Every potter cracks up his own vessel.
Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the quaternary, or pleistocene, age from our own is immense, and it is difficult to form an adequate notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is an abysmal difference between the Neanderthaloid race and the comely living specimens of the blond long-heads with whom we are familiar. But the abyss of time between the period at which North Europe was first covered with ice, when savages pursued mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp stones in central France, and the present day, ever widens as we learn more about the events which bridge it. And, if the differences between the Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided into as many parts as that time contains centuries, the progress from part to part would probably be almost imperceptible.
Leaves have their time to fall, And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath, And stars to set; but all, Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!--To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may. He carries with him for thousands of years a portion of his times; and, indeed, if only his own effigy were there, it would be greatly more than a fragment of his century.
Humor is the sublime wisdom of pity and tolerance in which man recognizes the utter futility of his own enterprise and importance.
Religion, in order to be _real_ religion, a man's own religion, must be searched for, must be discovered, must be conquered. If it is simply inherited, or accepted as a matter of course, it often happens that in later years it falls away, and has either to be reconquered, or to be replaced by another religion.
Though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.
I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or corporation. [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]
Ingeniis patuit campus, certusque merenti / Stat favor: ornatur propriis industria donis=--The field is open to talent and merit is sure of its reward. The gifts with which industry is crowned are her own.
Greatness is its own torment.
When every one minds his own business the work is done.
Folks must put up with their own kin as they put up with their own noses.
The beating of my own heart Was all the sound I heard.
Word of mouth was its own kind of magic.
And nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.
And in this case I know that I shall make not a few enemies, since no one will believe what I say of him; because there are but few whom his vices have disgusted, indeed they only disgusted those men whose natures are contrary to such vices; and many hate their fathers and break off friendship with those who reprove their vices, and they will have no examples brought up against them, nor tolerate any advice. And if you meet with any one who is good and virtuous drive him not away from you, do him honour, so that he may not have to flee from you and hide in hermitages, or caverns and other solitary spots, in order to escape from your treachery; and if there be such an one do him honour, because these are your gods upon earth, they deserve statues from you and images ... but remember that you are not to eat their images, as is practised still in some parts of India, where, when images have performed some miracle, the priests cut them in pieces (since they are of wood) and distribute them among the people of the country, not {51} without payment, and each one grates his portion very fine and puts it upon the first food he eats; and thus they believe that they have eaten their saint by faith, who will preserve them from all perils. What is thy opinion, O man, of thy own species? Art thou so wise as thou believest to be? Are these things to be done by men?
The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.--_George Eliot._
Joshua cried out, “Moses, my master, my teacher, I cannot bear the thought!” “Every man serves God in his own generation. As our father Abraham did and our father Isaac and our father Jacob, so I have tried to serve the great and almighty Jehovah. Now, know of the special love I have had for you two.” For a long time Moses stayed with the two men, encouraging them, until he stopped and said, “I must go.” “Let me go with you, master,” Joshua cried. “You are the new leader of Israel. One day you will join me, but now it is time for me to go meet with my God.
We wrap ourselves up in the cloak of our own better fortune, and turn away our eyes, lest the wants and woes of our brother-mortals should disturb the selfish apathy of our souls.