Faculty Quotes - Page 12

• Genius--the free and harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Play, Genius, Humans

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1836). “Conversations with Children on the Gospels”, p.39

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• Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Genius, May, Poverty

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.38

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• There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

  William Hazlitt

  Book, Order, Library

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• When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, endeavor to rouse your faculties, and act up to your kind, and consider that you have to do the business of a man; and that action is both beneficial and the end of your being.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Morning, Men, Action

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• If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Future, Men, Intellectual

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”

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• Fine taste is an aspect of genius itself, and is the faculty of delicate appreciation, which makes the best effects of art our own.

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

  Appreciation, Art, Genius

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• Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Beautiful, Simple, Reality

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• Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality; it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.

  James Russell Lowell

  Dream, Giving, Imagination

  James Russell Lowell (1888). “The English Poets Lessing: Rousseau”

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• The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.

  Joseph Addison

  Beauty, Discovery, Joy

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1854). “The Spectator: With a Biographical and Critical Preface, and Explanatory Notes ...”, p.273

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• No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.

  Joseph Addison

  Book, Writing, Men

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• Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.

  Joseph Addison

  Soul, Desire, Fruition

  Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1728). “The Spectator”, p.22

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• Much of the possibility of being cheerful comes from the faculty of throwing oneself beyond oneself.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Cheerful, Possibility, Throwing

  Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1992). “The Brownings' Correspondence: January 1845-July 1845, letters 1799-1981”

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• Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Believe, Animal

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• Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong,
  Be it in music, painting, or in song:
  But this, as well as other faculties,
  Improves with age and ripens by degrees.

  John Armstrong

  Song, Rude, Age

  John Armstrong (1770). “Miscellanies;”, p.129

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• A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Clothes, Office

  Thomas Carlyle (1871). “The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.166

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• Some of our philosophizing divines have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained that by their force mankind has been able to find out God.

  John Dryden

  Soul, Able, Too Much

  John Dryden, Paul Hammond, David Hopkins (2007). “Dryden: Selected Poems”, p.261, Pearson Education

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• Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul,--this makes life worth living.

  James Freeman Clarke

  Years, Soul, Progress

  James Freeman Clarke (1880). “Self-culture, lectures”

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• Man in society is like a flow'r,
  Blown in its native bed. 'Tis there alone
  His faculties expanded in full bloom
  Shine out, there only reach their proper use.

  William Cowper

  Men, Shining, Society

  William Cowper, John MACDIARMID (Editor of the “Dumfries and Galloway Courier.”.) (1819). “Poems ... To which is prefixed, a memoir of the author; also, critical remarks on his poems, written expressly for this work. By John M'Diarmid. Second edition, revised and extended”, p.298

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• Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.

  Robert Southey

  Men, Bird, Abuse

  Robert Southey (1831). “Sir Thomas Marc Or Colloquies on the Progress und Prospects of Sceuly, 1”, p.153

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• The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

  Thomas Paine

  Animal, Men, Use

  Thomas Paine (1819). “The Political Works of Thomas Paine: In Two Volumes”

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• Of all vices take heed of drunkenness; other vices are but fruits of disordered affections--this disorders, nay, banishes reason; other vices but impair the soul--this demolishes her two chief faculties, the understanding and the will; other vices make their own way--this makes way for all vices; he that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

  Francis Quarles

  Two, Understanding, Soul

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• Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Confusion, Mind

  William Pitt (Earl of Chatham), Edmund Burke, Thomas Erskine Baron Erskine, Jean Gabriel Peltier (1834). “Celebrated Speeches of Chatham, Burke, and Erskine: To which is Added the Arguement of Mr. Mackintosh in the Case of Peltier”, p.298

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• How is it that hope so powerfully excites, and fear so absolutely depresses all our faculties?

  Maria Edgeworth

  Hope, Depressing, Fear

  Maria Edgeworth, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1971). “The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

  Agnes Repplier

  Children, Book, Thinking

  Agnes Repplier (1888). “Books and Men”

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• Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

  John Ruskin

  Imagination, Healthy, Mind

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.214, University of Virginia Press

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