Word: minded
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...self-subsistent as that which appeals to our senses, nay, so often cheats them, in the matter of fact? How very small a part of the world we truly live in is represented by what speaks to us through the senses when compared with that vast realm of the mind which is peopled by memory and imagination, and with such shining inhabitants! These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span...
...beyond a question that one's intellectual dominion is greatly extended even by the mere ability to read other languages than his own. For it is precisely those works which are most characteristic, which most deepen and widen the mind, which quicken the sense of beauty, which beckon the imagination-it is precisely those which are untranslatable, nay, which are so in exact proportion as they are masterly. This is especially true of the great poets, the glow of whose genius fuses the word and the idea into a rich Corinthian metal which no imitation can replace. One feels this...
...that exemplary kind which no gentleman's library can be without, but there is another and rarer kind without which no man's education is complete. These are the representative books in which epochs culminated like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,- or which mark the transitions of the human mind like Cervantes and Gothe. But here Nature deals kindly and mercifully with us, and it is seldom that she gives more than one great speaker or singer to one race. There is a New England proverb which says of a fastidious person-"the best is not good enough for him," and this...
...enthusiasm, lampada vitae, by constantly holding up a certain nobler ideal in contrast with the base connivances of our daily life, and by affirming the inalienable pre-eminence of the soul. Of original men, that is, of men who had an implicit faith in the validity of their own minds and the competency of their own natures, I suppose Montaigne to have been as striking an instance as could readily be found. He more than any other man cut loose the modern from the ancient world, and emancipated the human mind from a pedantic and slavish deference to the past...
...begreifst, says the World Spirit to Faust, and this is true of the ascending no less than of the descending scale. Every book we read may be made a round in the ever-lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge and to that temperance and serenity of mind which, as it is the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the sweetest. But this can only be if we read such books as make us think, and read them in such a way as helps them to do so, that is, by endeavoring to judge them, and thus to make...