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Language is fossil poetry

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God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

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I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know ...more

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In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individual...more

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Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

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Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of image...more

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We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

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Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

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The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

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He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his fat...more

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Language is fossil Poetry.

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Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

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When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope t...more

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The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

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Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like man...more