in Quotes & Aphorisms (Life)
Human experience, like the stern-lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the path which we have passed over.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.
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Let us carry ourselves back in spirit to the mysterious week, to the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the generations of the heavens and the earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart could contemplate the filial and loyal bee, the home-building, wedded, and divorceless sparrow, and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant-tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk that fold in their tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached, and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun arising from behind, in the kindling morning of the creation!
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In this age we have a sort of reviviscence, not, I fear of the power, but of a taste for the power, of the early times.
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It is a strange folly to set ourselves no mark, to propound no end, in the hearing of the gospel.
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Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of pleasure.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Solidarity )
The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is, Prose is words in their best order; Poetry, the best words in the best order.
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"We live by faith," says the philosophic apostle; but faith without principles (on which to ground our faith and our hope) is but a flattering phrase for wilful positiveness or fanatical bodily sensations. Well, and with good right, therefore, do we maintain (and with more zeal than we should defend body or estate) a deep and inward conviction, which is as a moon to us; and like the moon, with all its massy and deceptive gleams, it yet lights us on our way (poor travellers as we are, and benighted pilgrims). With all its spots and changes and temporary eclipses, with all its vain haloes and bedimming vapours, it yet reflects the light that is to rise upon us, which even now is rising, though intercepted from our immediate view by the mountains that enclose and frown over the whole of our mortal life.
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Shakspeare has portrayed female character, and described the passion of love, with greater perfection than any other writer of the known world, perhaps with the single exception of Milton in the delineation of Eve.
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