Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion, you are being guilty of a kind of weakness that is dangerous to you and that will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favor; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs.

When standing in a hotel ballroom or when seated in a television studio, it is the duty of the tribunes of the people to insist that the drug traffic be stopped, the budget balanced, the schools improved, paradise regained. Off camera, they bootleg the distribution of the nation’s wealth to the gentry at whose feet they dance for coins.

Brisk: I confess I write but seldom, but when I do — keen iambicks I’gad.

While Fichte was delivering his Addresses in Berlin, a group of Königsberg professors formed a society known as the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, which hoped to regenerate Germany by fostering “morality, religion, serious taste, and public spirit,” and whose anti-French ravings Stein qualified as “the rage of dreaming sheep.” Another peculiar manifestation of the patriotic upsurge was the gymnastic association founded in Berlin by a school teacher, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as Turnvater — a term that can be rendered only approximately as “Father of Calisthenics.” Turnvater Jahn believed in patriotism through physical fitness and made his lads disport themselves athletically to be ready for the hour of revenge. The idea was unquestionably sound, but Jahn’s importance has been overrated by chauvinistic historians. The folklore known as classroom history has attributed a greater role to the Königsberg moralists and the Berlin gymnasts in the overthrow of Napoleon than they dese5rve; but for the reform of the Prussian army and Napoleons debacle in Russia they might still be there, practicing virtue and kneebends, without ever having slain a single Frenchman.

Lord Froth: But there is nothing more unbecoming a Man of Quality, than to Laugh; ‘tis such a vulgar Expression of the Passion! every Body can laugh.

Failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves.

I advise you to cultivate in private life that paternal and pliant character you display in government and to apply to public business the severity you show in your household.

Albuera was the bloodiest battle in the entire war — of the sixty-five hundred British infantry taking part in it, more than two-thirds were killed or wounded. [French General] Soult could not understand what had happened. “They could not be persuaded they were beaten,” he wrote of the English. “They were completely beaten, the day was mine, and they didn’t know it and wouldn’t run.” As a matter of fact, seeing the number of his casualties, [English General] Beresford did think that he had been beaten and said as much in his report to Wellington. “This won’t do,” Wellington replied. “It will drive the people in England mad. Write me down a victory.” Beresford wrote down a victory, and a victory it has been ever since. Thus, sometimes, are battles won.

This is the primitive foundation of all human language — what might be called the granite. Argot swarms with words of this kind, root-words, made out of whole cloth, we know not where nor by whom, without etymology, without analogy, without derivation, solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which have a singular power of expression, and which are all alive.

Argot, being the idiom of corruption, is easily corrupted. Moreover, as it always seeks disguise so soon as it perceives it is understood, it transforms itself. Unlike all other vegetation, every ray of light upon it kills what it touches. Thus argot goes on decomposed and recomposed incessantly; an obscure and rapid process which never ceases. It changes more in ten years than the language in ten centuries.

All the words of this language are perpetually in flight, like the men who use them.

Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

Let us not weary of repeating it: to think first of all the outcast and sorrowful multitudes, to solace them, to give them air, to enlighten them, to love them, to enlarge their horizon magnificently, to lavish upon them education in all its forms, to offer them the example of labor, never the example of idleness, to diminish the weight of the individual burden by intensifying the idea of the universal object, to limit poverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public and popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch out on all sides to the exhausted and the feeble, to employ the collective power in the great duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all intelligences, to increase wages, to diminish suffering, to balance the ought and the have, that is to say, to proportion enjoyment to effort and gratification to need, in a word, to evolve from the social structure, for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort; this is, let sympathetic souls forget it not, the first of fraternal obligations; this is, let selfish hearts know it, the first of political necessities.

You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men the same way, — and the fools know it.

Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.

If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

A creature of good humour and bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal almost to generosity, talkative almost to eloquence, bold almost to effrontery; the best possible devil’s-pie; with fool-hardy waistcoats and scarlet opinions.

They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the moon a new coat as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air as the heart of man, a melancholy man.

The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the “dissolving views” of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, — as old as eternity.

Dead men’s bones, hobgoblins, ghosts are ever in their minds, and meet them still at every turn; all the bugbears of the night, and terrors, fairybabes of tombs and graves are before their eyes and in their thoughts, as to women and children, if they be in the dark alone.

Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. Crucible into which destiny casts a man whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demigod.

On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.

I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one that was talking good things, — good enough to print? “Why,” said he, “you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.
   "Nothing but a very dusty street,“ he said, "and a man driving a sprinkling-machine through it.”
   "Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?

And now flutes with many stops breathed forth in sweet accord a Lydian air. But though their strains charmed the hearts of the spectators with their sweetness, Venus was sweeter far; and she began to move gently and to advance with slow and lingering step and body lightly swaying to and fro and softly bowing head, and with delicate gestures she kept time to the sound of the flutes and made signs with eyes now mildly closed, now flashing threats, and sometimes all her dancing was in her glances.

On the whole, I had rather judge men’s minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them.

He swoops all-conquering, borne on airy wing,
With fire and sword he makes his harvesting;
Trembles before him Jove, whom gods do dread,
And quakes the darksome river of the dead.

Some things are rushing into existence, others hastening to dissolution; and of those which now exist, some parts are already flown off and vanished. The world is renewed by continual change and fluctuation, as time is by perpetual succession. Who then would set any great value on things thus floating down the stream, and of which we cannot for a moment secure the possession? One might as well love a sparrow, which flies by us and is instantly gone out of sight. Such is the life of every man; a mere vapor exhaled from the blood; a momentary breath of air, drawn in by the lungs.