Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Necessity dispenseth with decorum.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man . . . A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.