"It is long since Mr. Carlyle expressed his opinion that if any poet or other literary creature could really be "killed off by one critique" or many, the sooner he was so despatched the better; a sentiment in which I for one humbly but heartily concur."

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“A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts.”

“Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.”

“Fear that makes faith may break faith; and a fool Is but in folly stable.”

“I can truly say with Shelley I have been fortunate in friendships: that I have been no less fortunate in my enemies than in my friends.”

“To wipe off the froth of falsehood from the foaming lips of inebriated virtue, when fresh from the sexless orgies of morality and reeling from the delirious riot of religion, may doubtless be a charitable office.”

“Is not Precedent indeed a King of men?”

Resonant Thoughts

"As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, …"

— Mary McCarthy

Literature1912–1989

#love

"In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper."

— Mikhail Lermontov

Literature1814–1841

#love

"I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery. I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against t…"

— Booker T. Washington

Literature1856–1915

#knowledge

"The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not…"

— Aristotle

Philosophy-384–-322

#nature