376
The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.
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Feeling
Attribution
377
The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.
378
What signifies the census--this periodical numbering of men--to one who has no friend?
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·April 29, 1851
379
Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.
380
Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it.
381
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.
382
Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful
383
It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak: only at moments when reality lies far away, and we do not wish to be conscious of our brethren.
384
Some there are that have no silence, and that kill the silence around them, and these are the only creatures that pass through life unperceived.
385
There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.
386
Whereas having many friends puts people apart and severs and disunites them, by transferring and shifting the tie of friendship too frequently, and does not admit of a mixture and welding of goodwill by the diffusing and compacting of intimacy.
387
it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker
388
Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.
389
By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.
390
One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings
391
There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it, and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end probably produces ill-humour.
392
Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance.
William Hazlittverified·On Living to One's-Self, in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners·January 1821
393
Old companions are like meats served up too often, that lose their relish and their wholesomeness.
William Hazlittverified·On Living to One's-Self, in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners·January 1821
394
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.
395
The result of it all may be summed up in his favourite motto, “Be kind, for every one is fighting a hard battle.”
Platomisattributed·“Ian Maclaren”: The Life of the Rev. John Watson, D.D., by W. Robertson Nicoll·1908
Wrongly attributed
Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.