There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth ... lust. When he is strong ... quarrelsomeness. When he is old ... covetousness.
If weakness may excuse, What murderer, what traitor, parricide, Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness; that plea, therefore, With God or man will gain thee no remission.
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.
They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.
I'll privily away; I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes; Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement, Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does not affect it.
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
Samson crushed himself and his enemies to death beneath the ruins of a building. He can only be excused on the grounds that the Spirit of the Lord, who wrought miracles through him, had bidden him to do so. But, apart from such men excepted by the command of a just law in general or of God, the very Source of justice, in a special case, any one who kills a human being, himself or another, is guilty of murder.