Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity.
What I'm interested in doing after I get out of the presidency is to make sure that I'm working with that next generation so that they understand you can't just rely on inspiration.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.
The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with. . . the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.
Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?
Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?
There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.