If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. Into all our human plight, Step by step, lifts bad to good, + -NATURE -MAY DAY Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist. -THE TRANSCENDENTALIST We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that God Is; that He is in me; and that all things are shadows of Him. + -CIRCLES What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the incomputable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? Has anything grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea. -THE METHOD OF NATURE Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his cannonade; if Christianity with its charity; if Trade with its money; if Art with its portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time-car set his dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls, and let the new creature emerge erect and free,—make way, and sing paan! The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. -CULTURE Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the world is the better for me, and to find my reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this unarmed child. + -MAN THE REFORMER "All that the world admires comes from within.” Thought makes us men; ranks us; distributes society; distributes the work of the world; is the prolific source of all arts, of all wealth, of all delight, of all grandeur. Men are as they believe. -THE MAN OF LETTERS The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society. Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable talent or skill in him, gives to every man's labour in the city a new worth. Wise ... -WEALTH ise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behaviour. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body is all tongues. . . . The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the Soul, or through how many forms it has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street passenger. -BEHAVIOR Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. -NATURAL HISTORY OF THE INTELLECT Literature is made up of a few ideas and a few fables. It is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two. We must learn to judge books by absolute standards. When we are aroused to a life in ourselves, these traditional splendours of letters grow very pale and cold. + -ON MODERN LITERATURE The Arabians say that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philosopher, conferred together; and, on parting the philosopher said, "All that he sees, I know"; and the mystic said, "All that he knows, I see." -SWEDENBORG Art is the path of the Creator to his work. The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly. -THE POET They should own who can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilisation. -WEALTH Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish. + -BEAUTY Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep. They address the imagination: only poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time. -BOOKS Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in the world unless he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. + -WEALTH To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories. ... The world is his who has money to go over it. . . . Is not, then, the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet I have never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be, or with an adequate command of nature. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilisation should be undone. + -WEALTH If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants, and put in ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of capital-the rates of insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it: the highways will be less secure: the schools will feel it; the children will bring home their little dose of poison: the judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his decisions be less upright; he has lost so much support and constraint,-which all need; and the pulpit will betray it, in a laxer rule of life. -WEALTH |