You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.
Nothing so cements and holds together all the parts of a society as faith or credit, which can never be kept up unless men are under some force or necessity of honestly paying what they owe to one another.
Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life.
If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man’s head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature.
If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards?
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey hither.