Human face divine. [ Milton ]

To step aside is human! [ Burns ]

All things human change. [ Tennyson ]

What is human is immortal! [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Human nature craves novelty. [ Pliny ]

Human laws reach not thoughts. [ Proverb ]

Tears are due to human misery. [ Virgil ]

Oh, God! it is a fearful thing
To see the human soul take wing
In any shape, in any mood! [ Byron ]

Human blood is all of a colour. [ Proverb ]

Human nature is fond of novelty. [ Pliny the Elder ]

No thought which ever stirred
A human breast should be untold. [ Robert Browning ]

And binding nature fast in fate.
Left free the human will. [ Pope ]

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry;
And born in bed, in bed we die;
The near approach a bed may show
Of human bliss to human woe. [ Isaac De Benserade ]

Doubt is hell in the human soul. [ Mme. de Gasparin ]

Human science is uncertain guess. [ Prior ]

To man, in this his trial state,
The privilege is given,
When tost by tides of human fate,
To anchor fast in heaven. [ Watts ]

Oh, frail estate of human things! [ Dryden ]

Amiable weakness of human nature. [ Gibbon ]

How like they are to human things! [ Longfellow ]

The worst of faces still is human. [ Lavater ]

All human power is but comparative. [ Proverb ]

Hopes and fears chequer human life. [ Proverb ]

Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought. [ Whittier ]

So vast is art; so narrow human wit. [ Pope ]

Anxiety is the poison of human life. [ Blair ]

Oblivion: a remedy for human misery. [ A. de Musset ]

Happiest they of human race,
To whom God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch and force the way;
And better had they ne'er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. [ Scott ]

A sweet forgetfulness of human care. [ Pope ]

To err is human; to forgive, divine. [ Alexander Pope ]

Live, live today; tomorrow never yet
On any human being rose or set. [ Marsden ]

The march of the human mind is slow. [ Burke ]

The precious porcelain of human clay. [ Byron ]

There are doors in every human heart. [ Virginia F. Townsend ]

One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit. [ Pope ]

Every form of human life is romantic. [ T. W. Higginson ]

Respect us human, and relieve us poor. [ Pope ]

Twist ye, twine ye! even so,
Mingle shades of joy and woe,
Hope, and fear, and peace, and strife,
In the thread of human life. [ Scott ]

All human wisdom, to divine, is folly. [ Sir J. Denham ]

Our soil is formed only of human dust. [ G. Legouvi ]

First of human blessings! and supreme. [ Thomson ]

O freedom, first delight of human kind! [ Dryden ]

Good sense is the master of human life. [ Bossuet ]

I wonder did you ever count
The value of one human fate;
Or sum the infinite amount
Of one heart's treasure, and the weight
Of life's one venture, and the whole
Concentrate purpose of a soul. [ Adelaide A. Procter ]

Human knowledge is the parent of doubt. [ Greville ]

What ignorance there is in human minds. [ Ovid ]

Necessity is stronger than human nature. [ Dionysius ]

The human voice is the organ of the soul. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

That hideous sight - a naked human heart. [ Young ]

I know
The past and thence I will essay to glean
A warning for the future, so that man
May profit by his errors, and derive
Experience from his folly;
For, when the power of imparting joy
Is equal to the will, the human soul
Requires no other heaven. [ Shelley ]

Habit is the deepest law of human nature. [ Carlyle ]

Human society is made up of partialities. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. [ Pope ]

This is the porcelain clay of human kind. [ Dryden ]

Necessity is ever stronger than human law. [ Dionysius ]

Human improvement is from within outwards. [ Froude ]

Ye realms, yet unrevealed to human sight,
Ye gods who rule the regions of the night.
Ye gliding ghosts permit me to relate
The mystic wonders of your silent state. [ Dryden ]

Good-nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive divine. [ Pope ]

Two principles in human nature reign--
Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain. [ Pope ]

The most magnificent and costly dome.
Is but an upper chamber to a tomb;
No spot on earth but has supplied a grave,
And human skulls the spacious ocean pave. [ Young ]

O death! thou gentle end of human sorrows. [ Rowe ]

When God endowed human beings with brains,
He did not intend to guarantee them. [ Montesquieu ]

Fortune, not wisdom, human life doth sway. [ Cicero ]

Not the rich viol, trump, cymbal, nor horn.
Guitar, nor cittern, nor the pining flute.
Are half so sweet as tender human words. [ Barry Cornwall ]

'Tis a stern and a startling thing to think
How often mortality stands on the brink
Of its grave without any misgiving;
And yet in this slippery world of strife,
In the stir of human bustle so rife.
There are daily sounds to tell us that Life
Is dying, and Death is living! [ Hood ]

How short is human life; the very breath,
Which frames my words, accelerates my death. [ Hannah More ]

There are, while human miseries abound,
A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth,
Without one fool or flatterer at your board,
Without one hour of sickness or disgust. [ Armstrong ]

It is human actions paint the chart of time. [ Montgomery ]

Where is the dust that has not been alive?
The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors;
From human mould we reap our daily bread. [ Young ]

Since trifles make the sum of human things,
And half our misery from our foibles springs. [ Hannah More ]

All human history attests
That happiness for man - the hungry sinner —
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner! [ Byron ]

The human race is governed by its imagination. [ Napoleon ]

Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies. [ Pope ]

There is nothing stronger than human prejudice. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Books make up no small part of human happiness. [ Frederick the Great ]

His genius quite obscured the brightest ray
Of human thought, as Sol's effulgent beams
At morn's approach, extinguished all the stars. [ R. Wynne ]

Death is the ultimate boundary of human matters. [ Horace ]

It is human to err, but diabolical to persevere. [ Proverb ]

What day, what hour, but knocks at human hearts,
To wake the soul to sense of future scenes?
Deaths stand like Mercurys, in every way,
And kindly point us to our journey's end. [ Dr. Young ]

Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Give tribute, but not oblation, to human wisdom. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

Trust me, that for the instructed, time will come
When they shall meet no object but may teach
Some acceptable lesson to their minds
Of human suffering or human joy.
For them shall all things speak of man. [ Wordsworth ]

Suffering in human life is very widely vicarious. [ Ward Beecher ]

The human mind will not be confined to any limits. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Gold adulterates one thing only - the human heart. [ Marguerite de Valois ]

Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies. [ James Fenimore Cooper ]

Human hearts should be temples where angels dwell. [ T. L. Harris ]

Knowledge is boundless, - human capacity, limited. [ Chamfort ]

I am a man, and I reckon nothing human alien to me. [ Ter ]

The human heart will always be the abyss of reason.

Men may be ungrateful, but the human race is not so. [ De Boufflers ]

To punish is merely human, but to forgive is divine. [ P. von Winter ]

Errors belong to libraries; truth, to the human mind. [ Goethe ]

A great library contains the diary of the human race. [ Dawson, Address on Opening the Birmingham Free Library ]

Religion - that voice of the deepest human experience. [ Matthew Arnold ]

The present is never a happy state to any human being; [ Dr. Johnson ]

To feel envy is human; to joy in mischief is devilish. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life. [ Pliny ]

Human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh. [ Seneca ]

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. [ George Eliot ]

All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance. [ Edward Gibbon ]

In the human breast two master* passions cannot coexist. [ Campbell ]

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius. [ Thomas Starr King ]

The very might of the human intellect reveals its limits. [ Madame Swetchine ]

Human Inventions are no essential parts of divine worship. [ Proverb ]

The human soul needs to be mated to develop all its value. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another. [ George Eliot ]

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature. [ Voltaire ]

Fortune molds and circumscribes human affairs as she pleases. [ Plautus ]

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence. [ Dr. Johnson ]

An empty human heart is an abyss earth's depths cannot match. [ Anne C. Lynch ]

Power's footstool is opinion, and his throne the human heart. [ Sir Aubrey de Vere ]

There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life. [ E. de Girardin ]

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature. [ Bobby Knight ]

The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature. [ Hare ]

The human heart is like heaven; the more angels the more room. [ Fredrika Bremer ]

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power. [ Horace Mann ]

Human judgment is finite, and it ought always to be charitable. [ W. Winter ]

Human reason may cure illusions, but it cannot cure sufferings. [ A. de Musset ]

The slippery tops of human state, the gilded pinnacles of fate. [ Cowley ]

The human race afraid of nothing, rushes on through every crime. [ Horace ]

The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern. [ W. R. Alger ]

The sin lessens in human estimation only as the guilt increases. [ Schiller ]

I know transplanted human worth will bloom to profit otherwhere. [ Tennyson ]

Human life is a constant want, and ought to be a constant prayer. [ S. Osgood ]

Music is a gift of the, Author of Nature to the whole human race. [ Hogarth ]

Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source of human offspring! [ Milton ]

The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. [ Hume ]

Though fame is smoke, its fumes are frankincense to human thoughts. [ Byron ]

Custom is the tyranny of the lower human faculties over the higher. [ Mme. Necker ]

The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul. [ George MacDonald ]

There is no opposing brutal force to the stratagems of human reason. [ L'Estrange ]

The sobbing wind is fierce and strong: Its cry is like a human wail. [ Susan Coolidge ]

Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole. [ Balzac ]

There occur cases in human life when it is wisdom not to be too wise. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

Love shows, even to the dullest, the possibilities of the human race. [ A. Helps ]

Nature provides without stint the main requisites of human happiness. [ Sir John Lubbock ]

There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy. [ Sheridan ]

A face with gladness overspread! Soft smiles, by human kindness bred! [ Wordsworth ]

To what gulfs a single deviation from the track of human duties leads! [ Byron ]

Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life. [ Chapin ]

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of the human character. [ Macaulay ]

Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full of the milk of human kindness. [ William Shakespeare ]

Wherever there is a human being there is an opportunity for a kindness. [ Seneca ]

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. [ Burke ]

Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature. [ Dryden ]

Health and good humor are to the human body like sunshine to vegetation. [ Massillon ]

Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection. [ Swift ]

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being. [ Beaconsfield ]

Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt. [ J. G. Saxe ]

Human happiness depends mainly upon the improvement of small opportunities. [ J. L. Basford ]

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn. [ B. R. Haydon ]

It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him whom you have injured. [ Tacitus ]

Kings and mightiest potentates must die, For that's the end of human misery. [ William Shakespeare ]

Genius - the free and harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being. [ Alcott ]

How wisely fate ordained for human kind Calamity! which is the perfect glass.
Wherein we truly see and know ourselves. [ Davenant ]

There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright. [ Ouida ]

Dreading that climax of all human ills, The inflammation of his wreekly bills. [ Byron ]

Human intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of human worth. [ Carlyle ]

All the rarest hues of human life take radiance and are rainbowed out in tears. [ Massey ]

One of the greatest of human sufferings is to ask of one's self: Does God exist? [ Erckmann Chatrian ]

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human. [ Plutarch ]

Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity. [ Burke ]

Mind is the great lever. Thought is the process by which human ends are answered. [ Webster ]

The human voice has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. [ Joubert ]

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

If there be aught surpassing human deed or word or thought, it is a mother's love. [ Mme. de Spadara ]

Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death. [ Chapin ]

To attain the height and depth of Thy eternal ways, all human thoughts come short. [ Milton ]

Nature repairs her ravages, - repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor. [ George Eliot ]

There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility. [ James Martineau ]

Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law. [ Pascal ]

The gods from heaven survey the fatal strife, and mourn the miseries of human life. [ Dryden ]

The human race is in the best condition when it has the greatest degree of liberty. [ Dante ]

The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil. [ Johnson ]

This is the field and acre of our God; this is the place where human harvests grow. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

There is nothing more nearly permanent in human life than a well established custom. [ Joseph Anderson ]

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little enjoyed. [ Johnson ]

The science of Nature initiates the human mind into the secret thoughts of Divinity. [ Mme. d'Agoult ]

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. [ George Eliot ]

Of earth's goods, the best is a good wife; a bad, the bitterest curse of human life. [ Simonides ]

Everything, virtue, glory, honor, things human and divine, all are slaves to riches. [ Horace ]

There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

He whom fortune has never deceived rarely considers the uncertainty of human events. [ Livy ]

The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth. [ Schelling ]

Knowledge is the only fountain, both of the love and the principles of human liberty. [ Daniel Webster ]

The rarest feeling that ever lights a human face is the contentment of a loving soul. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

The laws of love unite man and woman so strongly that no human laws can separate them. [ Balzac ]

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human; the latter is divine. [ Hosea Ballou ]

Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs. [ Sir J. Stephen ]

Even the best must own patience and resignation are the pillars of human peace on earth. [ Young ]

Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins. [ Scorpe Davies ]

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. [ Amiel ]

The time will come to every human being when it must be known how well he can bear to die. [ Johnson ]

There is no passion of the human heart that promises so much and pays so little as revenge. [ H. W. Shaw ]

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity, that will not forsake us. [ George Eliot ]

O human beauty, what a dream art thou, that we should cast our life and hopes away on thee! [ Barry Cornwall ]

Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next. [ Ovid ]

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic. [ Lamartine ]

Daring to face all hardships, the human race dashes through every human and divine restraint. [ Horace ]

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline. [ Seneca ]

The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure. [ Addison ]

To err is human: but contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked. [ Alfieri ]

When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven. [ Shelley ]

It is as difficult to condemn illicit loves by the laws of nature, as it is easy by human laws. [ Montaigne ]

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence. [ George Eliot ]

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. [ Dr. Johnson ]

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human-being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. [ George Eliot ]

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on. [ Pope ]

Literature draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies. [ Lowell ]

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history. [ Theodore Parker ]

Born to be ploughed with years, and sown with cares, and reaped by Death, lord of the human soil. [ Byron ]

Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

If the true did not possess an objective value, human curiosity would have died out centuries ago. [ Renan ]

Nothing so much convinces me of the boundlessness of the human mind as its operations in dreaming. [ W. B. Clulow ]

Uncertainty! fell demon of our fears! The human soul, that can support despair, supports not thee. [ Mallet ]

For everything divine and human, virtue, fame and honor, now obey the alluring influence of riches. [ Horace ]

Whatever crazy sorrow saith, no life that breathes with human breath has ever truly longed for death. [ Tennyson ]

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind. [ Colton ]

Great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. [ Lowell ]

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine carrion. [ Thoreau ]

The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it. [ Pascal ]

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury. [ E. H. Chapin ]

The sublimest canticle to be heard on earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy. [ Victor Hugo ]

The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold by far the most excellent place among human actions. [ Bacon ]

Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other. [ Luther ]

What a dismal, debasing, and confusing element is that of a sick body on the human soul or thinking part! [ Carlyle ]

No evil can touch him who looks on human beauty; he feels himself at one with himself and with the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Mental sunshine makes the mind grow, and perpetual happiness makes human nature a flower garden in bloom. [ Christian D. Larson ]

There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government. [ Johnson ]

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them. [ Froude ]

Good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force by giving it a human volition. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

It is the privilege of every human work which is well done, to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The poorest human soul is infinite in wishes, and the infinite universe was not made for one, but for all. [ Carlyle ]

There are in the human heart two cups, one for joy and one for sorrow, which empty themselves alternately. [ Mme. de Maintenon ]

In human hearts what bolder thoughts can rise than man's presumption on tomorrows' dawn? Where is tomorrow? [ Young ]

The lust of dominion burns with a flame so fierce as to overpower all other affections of the human breast. [ Tacitus ]

No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. [ John Ruskin ]

Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own. [ Terence ]

A man philosophizes better than a woman on the human heart, but she reads the hearts of men better than he. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

Human reason has so little confidence in itself that it always looks for a precedent to justify its decrees. [ De Finod ]

Labour endears rest, and both together are absolutely necessary for the proper enjoyment of human existence. [ Burns ]

Poetry is deep pain, and the genuine song issues only from the human heart through which a deep sorrow glows. [ Justin Kerner ]

The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other. [ Epictetus ]

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. [ George Eliot ]

Madness is the last stage of human debasement. It is the abdication of humanity. Better to die a thousand times! [ Napoleon ]

If there is anything that keeps the mind open to angel visits, and repels the ministry of ill, it is human love. [ Willis ]

The sun's power cannot draw a wandering star from its path. How then could a human being fall out of God's love! [ Rückert ]

Mind is the great lever of all things: human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. [ Daniel Webster ]

No human power can force the intrenchments of the human mind: compulsion never persuades; it only makes hypocrites. [ Fenelon ]

It is by no means improbable that the national character of human societies may be modified by their favorite diet. [ Chatfield ]

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe, - human or divine. A law is not law without coercion behind it. [ James A. Garfield ]

Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. [ Coleridge ]

The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of His wisdom who made it. [ Burke ]

Mind is the great leveller of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. [ Daniel Webster ]

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs. [ Emerson ]

To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. [ W. Godwin ]

God alone is entirely exempt from all want: of human virtues, that which needs least is the most absolute and divine. [ Plutarch ]

No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. [ John Ruskin ]

I have sped by land and sea, and mingled with much people, but never yet could find a spot unsunned by human kindness. [ Tupper ]

The greatest of all human benefits, that at least without which no other benefit can be truly enjoyed, is independence. [ Parke Godwin ]

In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy dying, in which human happiness consists. [ Montaigne ]

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves. [ William Pitt ]

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature but what he was forced to ascribe it to many inconsistencies. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Permanence is what I advocate in all human relations; nomadism, continual change, is prohibitory of any good whatsoever. [ Carlyle ]

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. [ Thomas Paine ]

A millstone and the human heart are driven ever round, If they have nothing else to grind, they must themselves be ground. [ Longfellow ]

It is very strange and very melancholy that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us to call hunting one of them. [ Dr. Johnson ]

The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality. [ George Eliot ]

The instability of friendship fumishes one of the most melancholy reflections suggested by the contemplation of human life. [ R. A. Wilmott ]

For the bow cannot possibly stand always bent, nor can human nature or human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation. [ Cervantes ]

Of all human actions, pride seldomest obtains its end; for, aiming at honor and reputation, it reaps contempt and derision. [ Walker ]

Happiness is only to be found in a recurrence to the principles of human nature; and these will prompt very simple measures. [ Beaconsfield ]

The fragrance of the flower is never borne against the breeze; but the fragrance of human virtues diffuses itself everywhere. [ Ramayana ]

Cheerfulness is full of significance; it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature. [ Charles Kingsley ]

Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the test of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves. [ Bishop Whately ]

Human wisdom is the aggregate of all human experience, constantly accumulating and selecting and reorganizing its own materials. [ Judge Joseph Story ]

Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above the beasts, in this lower world. [ Dr. Watts ]

On the greatest and most useful of all human inventions, that of alphabetical writing, Plato did not look with much complacency. [ T. B. Macaulay ]

They who minister to their neighbors exercise one of the normal human functions, and enter thereby into the joy of a larger life. [ George Hodges ]

The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it. [ Chapin ]

The happiness of the human race in this world does not consist in our being devoid of passions, but in our learning to command them. [ From the French ]

Transitory is all human work, small in itself, contemptible; only the worker thereof and the spirit that dwelt in him is significant. [ Carlyle ]

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy, which must sadden, or at least soften, every reflecting observer. [ Coleridge ]

Short, isolated sentences were the mode in which ancient wisdom delighted to convey its precepts for the regulation of human conduct. [ Bishop Warburton ]

Aspirations after the holy, - the only aspiration in which the human soul can be assured that it will never meet with disappointment. [ Maria McIntosh ]

Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair. [ Fielding ]

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race. [ Zimmermann ]

In our judgment of human transactions the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us. [ Whately ]

The strongest love which the human heart has ever felt has been that for its Heavenly Parent. Was it not then constituted for this love? [ W. E. Channing ]

The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth. [ Theodore Parker ]

Not in the achievement, but in the endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite God. [ Chapin ]

The finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it, and this in either case is equally incurable. [ Fielding ]

An old Spanish writer says, To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; but to return good for evil is godlike. [ Whately ]

Human action is a seed of circumstances scattered in the dark land of the future and hopefully left to the powers that rule human destiny. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

It is the saddest of all things that even one human soul should dimly perceive the beauty that is ever around us, a perpetual benediction. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

Hunting is a relic of the barbarous spirit that thirsted formerly for human blood, but is now content with the blood of birds and animals. [ Bovee ]

The finest lives, in my opinion, are those who rank in the common model and with the human race, but without miracle, without extravagance. [ Montaigne ]

No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech. [ James A. Garfield ]

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provisions of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction. [ Swift ]

The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth. [ Balzac ]

Glory darts her soul-pervading ray on thrones and cottages, regardless still of all the artificial nice distinctions vain human customs make. [ Hannah More ]

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs. [ Cicero ]

True passion is not a wisp-light; it is a consuming flame, and either it must find fruition or it will burn the human heart to dust and ashes. [ William Winter ]

Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness. [ Alfred de Musset ]

To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature. [ Lowell ]

Employment, which Galen calls nature's physician, is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery. [ Burton ]

Pride is a vice not only dreadfully mischievous in human society, but perhaps of all others, the most insuperable bar to real inward improvement. [ Mrs. E. Carter ]

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available. [ B. R. Haydon ]

A human heart is a skein of such imperceptibly and subtly interwoven threads, that even the owner of it is often himself at a loss how to unravel it. [ Ruffini ]

It is in periods of apparent disaster, during the sufferings of whole generations, that the greatest improvement in human character has been effected. [ Sir A. Alison ]

The human heart is often the victim of the sensations of the moment; success intoxicates it to presumption, and disappointment dejects and terrifies it. [ Volney ]

In all societies it is advisable to associate if possible with the highest. In the grand theater of human life a box ticket takes you through the house. [ Colton ]

The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one is the age of innocence, the other of reason. [ Joubert ]

The true strength of every human soul is to be dependent on as many nobler as it can discern, and to be depended upon by as many inferior as it can reach. [ John Ruskin ]

There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they are made to breathe. [ Holmes ]

Before Greece, every thing in human literature and art was a rude and imperfect attempt. Since Greece, every thing has been a rude and imperfect imitation. [ James Freeman Clarke ]

Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes, form the chief interests of human life. [ Channing ]

There are two things which ought to teach us to think but meanly of human glory; the very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists. [ Colton ]

A human heart can never grow old, if it takes a lively interest in the pairing of birds, the reproduction of flowers, and the changing tints of autumn leaves. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete, devotes his heart entirely to money. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]

The human soul is like a bird that is born in a cage. Nothing can deprive it of its natural longings, or obliterate the mysterious remembrance of its heritage. [ Epes Sargent ]

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, responded. [ Lowell ]

All those observers who have spent their lives in the study of the human heart, know less about the signs of love than the most brainless, yet sensitive woman. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

Government is the greatest combination of forces known to human society. It can command more men and raise more money than any and all other agencies combined. [ D. D. Field ]

Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

One should never take sides in anything - taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly after, and the human being becomes a bore. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

The human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make any progress in disentangling it. [ Scott ]

Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. [ Lowell ]

It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth. [ Albert Barnes ]

When the Divine Artist would produce a poem, He plants a germ of it in a human soul, and out of that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose-tree the rose [ James A. Garfield ]

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, Necessity and Free Will. [ Carlyle ]

Depend upon it, my younger brethren, the bright, self-sacrificing enthusiasms of early manhood are among the most precious things in the whole course of human life. [ H. P. Liddon ]

There is nothing that is so wonderfully created as the human soul. There is something of God in it. We are infinite in the future, though we are infinite in the past [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Literature consists of all the books--and they are not many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. [ John Morley ]

Our happiness as human beings, generally speaking, will be found to be very much in proportion to the number of things we love, and the number of things that love us. [ Samuel Smiles ]

If human love hath power to penetrate the veil - and hath it not? - then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them. [ Hawthorne ]

Teeth, hair, nails, and the human species, prosper not when separated from their place. A wise man, being informed of this, should not totally forsake his native home. [ Hitopadesa ]

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man. [ Theodore Parker ]

Wanting to have a friend is altogether different from wanting to be a friend. The former is a mere natural human craving, the latter is the life of Christ in the soul. [ J. R. Miller ]

There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties by which the foolish part of men's minds are taken are more potent. [ Bacon ]

The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will he honor who honors not the human? [ Lavater ]

Every thought and word and deed, of every human being, is followed by its inevitable consequence: for the one we are responsible; with the other we have nothing to do. [ Gail Hamilton ]

In human life there is a constant mutability; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate; life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. [ Plutarch ]

The imputation of being a fool is a thing which mankind, of all others, is the most impatient of, it being a blot upon the prime and specific perfection of human nature. [ South ]

Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force. [ Pascal ]

Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature. [ Sears ]

In human life there is a constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. [ Plutarch ]

In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that ever was or ever will be of godlike in this world, - the veneration done to human worth by the hearts of men. [ Carlyle ]

Unwillingness to acknowledge whatever is good in religion foreign to our own has always been a very common trait of human nature; but it seems to me neither generous nor just. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised by it, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem. [ Pascal ]

There is something in meanness? which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred. [ Thomas Paine ]

If ever this free people, if this government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this human wriggle and struggle for office - that is a way to live without work. [ Abraham Lincoln ]

There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering, as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us. [ Bulwer ]

If you keep Nature faithfully in view, the example of every thorough master will be of service to you; but if you merely cling to human work, all that you do will be but mannerism. [ Geibel ]

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast. [ Goldsmith ]

When I beheld human affairs involved in such dense darkness, the guilty exulting in their prosperity, and pious men suffering wrong, what religion I had began to reel backward and fall. [ Claudius, Claudian ]

Most men take least notice of what is plain, as if that was of no use; but puzzle their thoughts to be themselves in those vast depths and abysses which no human understanding can fathom. [ Bishop Sherlock ]

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low. [ Swift ]

The human intellect is the great truth-organ; realities, as they exist, are the subjects of its study; and knowledge is the result of its acquaintance with the things which it investigates. [ Moses Harvey ]

God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. [ Burke ]

Nobody can live by teaching any more than by learning; both teaching and learning are proper duties of human life, or pleasures of it, but have nothing whatever to do with the support of it. [ John Ruskin ]

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction. [ Dryden ]

Lover, daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother: in those six words lies what the human heart contains of the sweetest, the most ecstatic, the most sacred, the purest, and the most ineffable. [ Massias ]

True worth is as inevitably discovered by the facial expression, as its opposite is sure to be clearly represented there. The human face is nature's tablet, the truth is certainly written thereon. [ Lavater ]

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character. [ William Matthews ]

The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality; to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations, the relation between the creature and his Creator. [ Daniel Webster ]

Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves. [ A. B. Alcott ]

The stoical exemption which philosophy affects to give us over the pains and vexations of human life is as imaginary as the state of mystical quietism and perfection aimed at by some crazy enthusiast. [ Scott ]

There is nothing so elastic as the human mind. Like imprisoned steam, the more it is pressed the more it rises to resist the pressure. The more we are obliged to do, the more we are able to accomplish. [ T. Edwards ]

God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinction? [ Jeffrey ]

Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Men are tatooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. [ Robert Collyer ]

O, if the deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves! [ Dickens ]

The secret of happiness lies in the health of the whole mind, and in giving to each faculty due occupation, and in the natural order of their superiorities, the Divine first, the human second, the material last. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye; of music where there is an unstopped human ear; and of inspiration where there is a receptive human spirit, a spirit standing before. [ C. H. Parkhurst ]

The human heart is like a millstone in a mill: when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds and bruises the wheat to flour; if you put no wheat, it still grinds on, but then 'tis itself it grinds and wears away. [ Martin Luther ]

Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature; such as the beauty of sentiments, the grace of actions, the turn of characters, and the proportions and features of a human mind. [ Shaftesbury ]

The art of navigation is one of the greatest achievements of human genius; man with its aid obtains a knowledge of the globe he inhabits, opens communications with, and extends his field of operations to all its parts. [ A. Brisbane ]

Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those that come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave. [ Ruskin ]

Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress. [ E. de Girardin ]

I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. [ A. B. Hegeman ]

Like the tiger, that seldom desists from pursuing man after having once preyed upon human flesh, the reader who has once gratified his appetite with calumny makes ever after the most agreeable feast upon murdered reputations! [ Goldsmith ]

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down. [ Chapin ]

Great men are the fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed, embodied possibilities of human nature. [ Carlyle ]

The human heart is like a millstone in a mill; when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds, and bruises the wheat into flour; if you put no wheat in it, it still grinds on; but then it is itself it grinds, and slowly wears away. [ M. Luther ]

The tongue of man is powerful enough to render the ideas which the human intellect conceives; but in the realm of true and deep sentiments it is but a weak interpreter. These are inexpressible, like the endless glory of the Omnipotent. [ Kossuth ]

Government began in tyranny and force, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the organised selfishness of human nature. [ Wendell Phillips ]

Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away. Enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what tomorrow may produce. [ Horace ]

But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age. [ Beecher ]

Love one human being with warmth and purity, and thou wilt love the world. The heart, in that celestial sphere of love, is like the sun in its course. From the drop on the rose to the ocean, all is for him a mirror, which he fills and brightens. [ Jean Paul ]

The human mind, in proportion as it is deprived of external resources, sedulously labours to find within itself the means of happiness, learns to rely with confidence on its own exertions, and gains with greater certainty the power of being happy. [ Zimmermann ]

Human excellence, parted from God, is like a fable flower, which, according to Rabbis, Eve plucked when passing out of paradise - severed from its native root, it is only the touching memorial of a lost Eden; sad, while charming - beautiful, but dead. [ C. Stanford ]

If you should take the human heart and listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns. [ Chapin ]

How mighty is the human heart, with all its complicated energies; this living source of all that moves the world! this temple of liberty, this kingdom of heaven, this altar of God, this throne of goodness, so beautiful in holiness, so generous in love! [ Henry Giles ]

The kindness of Christmas is the kindness of Christ. To know that God so loved us as to give us His Son for our dearest Brother, has brought human affection to its highest tide on the day of that Brother's birth. If God so loved us, how can we help loving one another? [ Maltbie Babcock ]

The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance. [ Ruskin ]

Nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. [ Voltaire ]

Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals. What progress in language!

Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate, depend upon books. [ Richard Aungervyle ]

Pound St. Paul's Church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is to be sure, good for nothing; but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shown to be very insignificant. [ Dr. Johnson ]

We have often thought it strange that moralists should have written and spoken of the mutability of human life as if it were a thing to be dreaded and mourned over; to our mind, mutability is the soul of poetry, and the source of nearly all the most delightful and sacred pleasures of life. [ Stubbs ]

Liberty is the richest inheritance which man has received from the skies! When shall its sacred fire burn in every bosom, and kindling with the thrilling force of inspiration, spread from heart to heart and from mind to mind, and be the common privilege and birthright of every human being? [ Acton ]

The difference between a parable and an apologue is that the former, being drawn from human life, requires probability in the narration, whereas the apologue, being taken from inanimate things or the inferior animals, is not confined strictly to probability. The fables of Aesop are apologues. [ Fleming ]

The physical plagues and the calamities of human nature have rendered society necessary. Society has added to the evils of nature; the imperfections of society have created the necessity for government, and government adds still further to the woes of society: this is the whole history of humanity. [ Chamfort ]

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. [ Watts ]

Anxiety is the poison of human life. It is the parent of many sins, and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, where you may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, what means this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can your solicitude alter the cause or unravel the intricacy of human events? [ Blair ]

The king is but a man, as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. [ William Shakespeare ]

Music has certainly a powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately; but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. [ S. F. Bradford ]

It unfortunately happens that no man believes that he is likely to die soon. So every one is much disposed to defer the consideration of what ought to be done on the supposition of such an emergency; and while nothing is so uncertain as human life, so nothing is so certain as our assurance that we shall survive most of our neighbors. [ Aughey ]

To be a finite being is no crime, and to be the Infinite is not to be a creditor. As man was not consulted he does not find himself a party in a bargain, but a child in the household of love. Reconciliation, therefore, is not the consequence of paying a debt, or procuring atonement for an injury, but an organic process of the human life. [ John Weiss ]

The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread. [ Bryant ]

There are so many things to lower a man's top-sails - he is such a dependent creature - he is to pay such court to his stomach, his food, his sleep, his exercise - that, in truth, a hero is an idle word. Man seems formed to be a hero in suffering, not a hero in action. Men err in nothing more than in the estimate which they make of human labor. [ Cecil ]

Blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts, the food that appeases hunger, the drink that quenches thirst, the fire that warms cold, the cold that moderates heat, and, lastly, the general coin that purchases all things, the balance and weight that equals the shepherd with the king, and the simple with the wise. [ Cervantes ]

It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art. in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts made by successive generations of men - the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid. [ Samuel Smiles ]

The joy resulting from the diffusion of blessings to all around us is the purest and sublimest that can ever enter the human mind, and can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. Next to the consolations of divine grace, it is the most sovereign balm to the miseries of life, both in him who is the object of it, and in him who exercises it. [ Bishop Porteus ]

By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages. [ Hazlitt ]

The brute animals have all the same sensations of pain as human beings, and consequently endure as much pain when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their sufferings, and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme pain. Their happiness consists entirely in present enjoyment. [ Chalmers ]

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature. [ Sterne ]

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary. [ Hazlitt ]

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano will break out and flame up to heaven. [ Daniel Webster ]

A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns of expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression. Words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring. [ Whipple ]

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all - but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered. [ Coleridge ]

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose. [ Balzac ]

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. [ Channing ]

Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]

A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero, - the wise, the good, or the great man, - very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light. [ Joseph Addison ]

Those who start for human glory, like the mettled hounds of Actaeon, must pursue the game not only where there is a path, but where there is none. They must be able to simulate and dissimulate; to leap and to creep; to conquer the earth like Caesar, or to fall down and kiss it like Brutus; to throw their sword like Brennus into the trembling scale, or, like Nelson, to snatch the laurels from the doubtful hand of Victory, while she is hesitating where to bestow them. [ Colton ]

There are chords in the human heart - strange varying strings - which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch. In the most insensible or childish minds there is some train of reflection which art can seldom lead or skill assist, but which will reveal itself, as great truths have done, by chance, and when the discoverer has the plainest and simplest end in view. [ Dickens ]

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

No process is so fatal as that which would cast all men in one mould. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations. It is to wear innumerable forms of beauty and glory. Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influences to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. [ Channing ]

The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it. But we cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for; that task is left to others. With the desire for excellence comes, therefore, the desire for approbation. And this distinguishes intellectual excellence from moral excellence; for the latter has no necessity of human tribunal; it is more inclined to shrink from the public than to invite the public to be its judge. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

There is a hand that has no heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take hold of, a piece of unbaked dough on the cook's trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palmleaf! Sometimes it is what a knifeshaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by! [ C. A. Bartol ]

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]

The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]

True hope is based on energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself, it is not confined to partial views, or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself, its own integrity and worth. Hope awakens courage, while despondency is the last of all evils, it is the abandonment of good, the giving up of the battle of life with dead nothingness. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician. [ Von Knebel (German), Translated by Mrs. Austin ]