Wisdom is infused into every form.
It is in bad taste," is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.
The virtue in most request is conformity.
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.
Every reform was once a private opinion.
To be a man is to be a nonconformist.
Our expenses are all for conformity.
Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.
Conformity is the ape of harmony.
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.
Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?
There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
All promise outruns performance.
As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.
Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes.
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.
As picture teaches the colouring, so sculpture the anatomy of form.
We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.
It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make asally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.
A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances