When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.
Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.
What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner. . . I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.
The Girl of the Period, sauntering before one down Broadway, is one panorama of awful surprises from top to toe. Her clothes characterize her. She never characterizes her clothes. She is upholstered, not ornamented. She is bundled, not draped. She is puckered, not folded. She struts, she does not sweep. She has not one of the attributes of nature nor of proper art. She neither soothes the eye like a flower, nor pleases it like a picture. She wearies it like a kaleidoscope. She is a meaningless dazzle of broken effects.
Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?
The literary artist will. . . portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
When a building is as good as that one, f#*@ the art.
Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
I'm a raging leftist political activist. I've never had a spiritual thought in my life related to God. I'm clear that that's a human invention.
Stay put in the hard places, and you'll eventually rest upon the mountaintop.