*
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to
decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain
heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an
Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat
of admiration.
*
After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
civilisation than a court of law? Hither come envy,
malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in
public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed
households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low
building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's
bell told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them
pause to count the strokes and wander on again into the
moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.
*
There are two things that men should never weary of--
goodness and humility.
*
It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the
earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or
something else must follow. To live is sometimes very
difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If
Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of
trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end.
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