He decided to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living.
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.
I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.