Word: minds
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...believe that the study of imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind, and to keep the Caliban Common Sense, a very useful monster in his proper place from making himself King over us. It is the study of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason. It teaches that chance has less to do with success than forethought, will and work...
...antiquity than Swinburne with all his Greek. And why? Because he read, not to become Greek, but drawn by a passion for the same ideal beauty that made the Greeks themselves Greek. The advice of Cato, cum bonis ambula, holds as good of books as of men. If the mind, like the dyer's hand, becomes insensibly subdued to what it works in, so also may it steep itself in a noble and victorious mood, may sweeten itself with a refinement that feels a vulgar thought like a stain, and store up sunshine against darker days. It is the books...
...have one meat served in divers dishes." But I think that to know the literature of another language, whether dead or living matters not, gives us the prime benefits of foreign travel. It relieves us from what Richard Lassels aptly calls a "moral Excommunication;" it greatly widens the mind's range of view, and therefore of comparison, thus strengthening the judicial faculty; and it teaches us to consider the relations of things to each other and to some general scheme rather than to ourselves; above all, it enlarges aethetic charity. It has seemed to me also that a foreign language...
...these shy allurements and provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an original poet of him in the very act of translating. I cite this instance merely by way of hint that as a spur to the mind, as an open-sesame to the treasures of our native vocabulary, the study of a living language (for literary, not linguistic, ends) may serve as well as that of any which we rather inaptly call dead...
...value as its roots; for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of the mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful...