The American Scholar

Commonplace Book

You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always hurry back.

—Horace, Epistle 1.10, 20 B.C.

‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right …

, “I Am an American

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