The populace is like the sea motionless in itself, but stirred by every wind, even the lightest breeze.
Itself
He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
It cannot be said that the Constitution formed ‘the people of the United States,’ for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of ‘the people’ as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not describe itself as ‘we,’ nor as ‘people,’ nor as ‘ourselves.’ Nor does a corporation, in legal language, have any ‘posterity.’
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.
The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.
Before the sacred, people lost all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my – conscience.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.