When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the great and deep qualities of mind, heart, and soul, there is no change. Homer and Solomon speak to the same nature in man th...at is reached by Shakespeare and Lincoln. but in the accidents, the surroundings, the change is vast. All things now are mobile--movable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say this town is full of cozenage: As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,... Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such-like liberties of sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest convictions are permanent. With regard to essentials, I have never had occasio...n to change my mind. The aspect of the world varies from year to year, as the landscape is differently clothed, but I find that the truth is still true, and I never regret any emphasis which it may have inspired. Ktaadn is there still, but much more surely my old conviction is there, resting with more than mountain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and affording glorious views from its summit, if I can get up to it again. As the mountains still stand on the plain, and far more unchangeable and permanent,--stand still grouped around, farther or nearer to my maturer eye, the ideas which I have entertained,--the everlasting teats from which we draw our nourishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is establi...shed you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life of mind is best and pleasantest for man, since mind more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happi...est.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of... the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and... it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?... We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »