What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say for two thousand years. And then? Why then a fathomless eternity swallows it. Carlyle.
What actually constitutes the human element 45 in man is a kindly spirit. Schiller.
What an enormous camera obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory, in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart is there to encourage it! Carlyle.
What an inaccessible stronghold that man possesses who is always in earnest with himself and the things around him! Goethe.
What are all our histories but God manifesting himself, that he hath shaken, and tumbled down, and trampled upon everything that he hath not planted! Oliver Cromwell.
What are all prayers beneath / But cries of babes, that cannot know / Half the deep thought they breathe? Keble.
What are men better than sheep or goats, / 5 That nourish a blind life within the brain, / If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer / Both for themselves and those who call them friend? Tennyson.
What are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? Details by themselves will never teach us what it is. Carlyle.
What are we great ones on the wave of humanity? We think we rule it when it rules us, and drives us up and down, hither and thither, as it listeth. Goethe.
What are words but empty sounds, that break and scatter in the air, and make no real impression? Thomas à Kempis.