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Rufus Choate Quote

“You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.”

— Rufus Choate

Source: Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers — Wikisource

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It is a great mistake to think any thing too profound or rich for a popular audience. No train of thought is too deep, or subtle, or grand—but the manner of presenting it to their untutored minds should be peculiar. It should be presented in anecdote, or sparkling truism, or telling illustration, or stinging epithet; always in some concrete form, never in a logical, abstract, syllogistic shape.

— Rufus Choate

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Ability involves responsibility. Power to its last particle is duty.

— Alexander Maclaren

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Man is not altogether an imbecile. True, "circumstances do make the man." But they make him only in the sense and degree that he permits them to make him.

— G. D. Boardman

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What we do upon a great occasion will probably depend upon what we already are; what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline, under the grace of Christ or the absence of it.

— H. P. Liddon

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Moral conduct includes every thing in which men are active and for which they are accountable. They are active in their desires, their affections, their designs, their intentions, and in every thing they say and do of choice; and for all these things they are accountable to God.

— Emmons

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The end of man is an action, and not a thought, though it were the noblest.

— Thomas Carlyle

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