Will Henry Quotes
I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.
The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.
The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.
Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.
Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.
In the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, I fear, men never attain to.
In my cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n't my business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much its business to be seeking me.
Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet how long it stands in vain!... Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.
In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.
As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.
Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.
Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.
It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and sublimest truth?
A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.
Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them.
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?
How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.
Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.
I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves.
For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.
The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.
A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
What a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time,--the eternal laws!
It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in man's society.
Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.
The forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear theatmosphere of smoke.
It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.
The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.
They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.
