The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, ...in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with ...a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise C...ommiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of "living well," which all men desire; all acts are but diff...erent means chosen to arrive at it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.... And a man who is puzzled and wonder...s thinks himself ignorant ...; therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled ...business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things, abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business; but the errors of aged men amount but to this, that more might have done, or sooner. Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Ever...ything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »