Top quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. Votes: 29

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. Votes: 23

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.' Votes: 23

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting. Votes: 21

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold. Votes: 21

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Votes: 18

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. Votes: 16

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. Votes: 16

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves. Votes: 16

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Votes: 15

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body. Votes: 14

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. Votes: 14

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature. Votes: 14

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Votes: 14

The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear. Votes: 14

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. Votes: 13

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. Votes: 10

Beauty without expression is boring. Votes: 10

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Votes: 9

Nature hates calculators. Votes: 9

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. Votes: 8

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. Votes: 8

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain. Votes: 7

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Votes: 7

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated. Votes: 7

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff. Votes: 6

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. Votes: 6

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused. Votes: 5

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? Votes: 4

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. Votes: 4

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war. Votes: 0

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood. Votes: 0

The first wealth is health. Votes: 0

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. Votes: 0

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change. Votes: 0

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world. Votes: 0

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. Votes: 0

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist. Votes: 0

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation. Votes: 0

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work. Votes: 0

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation. Votes: 0

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. Votes: 0

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well. Votes: 0

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass. Votes: 0

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples. Votes: 0

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Votes: 0

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Votes: 0

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Votes: 0

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved. Votes: 0

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days. Votes: 0

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. Votes: 0

There is creative reading as well as creative writing. Votes: 0

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. Votes: 0

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France. Votes: 0

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. Votes: 0

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Votes: 0

All diseases run into one, old age. Votes: 0

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. Votes: 0

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence. Votes: 0

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. Votes: 0

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom. Votes: 0

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. Votes: 0

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. Votes: 0

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. Votes: 0

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Votes: 0

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom. Votes: 0

The highest revelation is that God is in every man. Votes: 0

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. Votes: 0

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women. Votes: 0

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about. Votes: 0

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. Votes: 0

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events. Votes: 0

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity. Votes: 0

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Votes: 0

We acquire the strength we have overcome. Votes: 0

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen. Votes: 0

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. Votes: 0

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind. Votes: 0

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society. Votes: 0

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Votes: 0

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. Votes: 0

A man is what he thinks about all day long. Votes: 0

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. Votes: 0

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. Votes: 0

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting. Votes: 0

Our best thoughts come from others. Votes: 0

The earth laughs in flowers. Votes: 0

Power and speed be hands and feet. Votes: 0

Good men must not obey the laws too well. Votes: 0

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. Votes: 0

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. Votes: 0

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. Votes: 0

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Votes: 0

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. Votes: 0

All mankind love a lover. Votes: 0

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know. Votes: 0

People only see what they are prepared to see. Votes: 0

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. Votes: 0

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground. Votes: 0

It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. Votes: 0

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. Votes: 0

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries. Votes: 0

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. Votes: 0

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are. Votes: 0

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Votes: 0

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Votes: 0

Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. Votes: 0

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day. Votes: 0

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. Votes: 0

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Votes: 0

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare. Votes: 0

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side. Votes: 0

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay. Votes: 0

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain. Votes: 0

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? Votes: 0

To be great is to be misunderstood. Votes: 0

The reward of a thing well done is having done it. Votes: 0

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. Votes: 0

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. Votes: 0

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones. Votes: 0

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. Votes: 0

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs. Votes: 0

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits. Votes: 0

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare. Votes: 0

The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain. Votes: 0

Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought. Votes: 0

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and houses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Votes: 0

In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics. Votes: 0

The people are to be taken in very small doses. Votes: 0

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Votes: 0

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. Votes: 0

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,Seems nowhere to alight Votes: 0

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest Votes: 0

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. Votes: 0

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God." Votes: 0

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." Votes: 0

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing." Votes: 0

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it." Votes: 0

As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he. Votes: 0

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment. Votes: 0

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success. Votes: 0

The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible. Votes: 0

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode. Votes: 0

Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators than themselves. Votes: 0

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Votes: 0

This is my wish for you: Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth, Love to complete your life. Votes: 0

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it. Votes: 0

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Votes: 0

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. Votes: 0

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. Votes: 0

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. Votes: 0

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of water; in male and female; in the equation of quantity and quality; in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole an Votes: 0

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought. Votes: 0

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine Votes: 0

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. Votes: 0

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. Votes: 0

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. Votes: 0

There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries. Votes: 0

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. Votes: 0

Harder still it has proved to rule the dragon Money... A whole generation adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief they were enriching the country they were impoverishing. Votes: 0

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. Votes: 0

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes. Votes: 0

The eye is the painter and the ear the singer. Votes: 0

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed. Votes: 0

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even. Votes: 0

I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise. Votes: 0

We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Votes: 0

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. Votes: 0

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air. Votes: 0

Everything intercepts us from ourselves. Votes: 0

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. Votes: 0

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms. Votes: 0

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded. Votes: 0

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue. Votes: 0

The shot heard round the world. Votes: 0

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship. Votes: 0

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. Votes: 0

To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation. Votes: 0

Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where aour spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry. Votes: 0

The ancestor of every action is a thought. Votes: 0

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. Votes: 0

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. Votes: 0

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. Votes: 0

Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances. Votes: 0

Hence, the less government we have, the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formalGovernment, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. Votes: 0

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds. Votes: 0

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Votes: 0

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here. Votes: 0

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Votes: 0

Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth. Votes: 0

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause. Votes: 0

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.... Votes: 0

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated. Votes: 0

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. Votes: 0

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens. Votes: 0

The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. Votes: 0

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. Votes: 0

Language is the archives of history. Votes: 0

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. Votes: 0

I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Votes: 0

The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play. Votes: 0

And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. Votes: 0

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. Votes: 0

The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate. Votes: 0

Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow Votes: 0

Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature. Votes: 0

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. Votes: 0

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Votes: 0

Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles? Votes: 0

The faith that stands on authority is not faith. Votes: 0

The lover of letters loves power too. Votes: 0

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. Votes: 0

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Votes: 0

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Votes: 0

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. Votes: 0

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. Votes: 0

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome. Votes: 0

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. Votes: 0

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose... Votes: 0

Repose and cheerfulness is the badge of the gentleman; repose in energy. Votes: 0

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge. Votes: 0

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Votes: 0

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never. Votes: 0

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. Votes: 0

What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All. Votes: 0

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Votes: 0

Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. Votes: 0

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Votes: 0

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude. Votes: 0

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble. Votes: 0

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind. Votes: 0

Patience and fortitude conquer all things. Votes: 0

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . Votes: 0

A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams. Votes: 0

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Votes: 0

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Votes: 0

Women stand related to beautiful nature around us, and the enamoured youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind: teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult. Votes: 0

Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. Votes: 0

A beautiful soul always dwells in a beautiful world. Votes: 0

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. Votes: 0

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive. Votes: 0

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Votes: 0

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man. Votes: 0

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. Votes: 0

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. Votes: 0

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you. Votes: 0

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back. Votes: 0

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind. Votes: 0

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action. Votes: 0

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think. Votes: 0

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends. Votes: 0

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great. Votes: 0

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. Votes: 0

Be a gift and a benediction. Votes: 0

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors. Votes: 0

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful. Votes: 0

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit. Votes: 0

The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Votes: 0

Thou art to me a delicious torment. Votes: 0

The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also. Votes: 0

The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor. Votes: 0

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons. Votes: 0

I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives. Votes: 0

Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window. Votes: 0

Whatever it is, it's better in the wind. Votes: 0

If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride. Votes: 0

Do not follow where the path may lead. Votes: 0

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Votes: 0

There is properly no history, only biography. Votes: 0

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know Votes: 0

All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. Votes: 0

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. Votes: 0

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it. Votes: 0

Tis the good reader that makes the good book. Votes: 0

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. Votes: 0

Never read a book that is not a year old. Votes: 0

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. Votes: 0

Every hero becomes a bore at last. Votes: 0

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation. Votes: 0

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. Votes: 0

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. Votes: 0

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Votes: 0

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye. Votes: 0

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place. Votes: 0

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag. Votes: 0

This valley is the only place that comes up to the brag about it, and exceeds it. Votes: 0

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. Votes: 0

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. Votes: 0

Thought is the seed of action. Votes: 0

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. Votes: 0

How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely. Votes: 0

You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Votes: 0

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe. Votes: 0

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it. Votes: 0

As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes. Votes: 0

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings Votes: 0

Souls are not saved in bundles. Votes: 0

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men. Votes: 0

Every burned book enlightens the world. Votes: 0

Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit. Votes: 0

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders. Votes: 0

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. Votes: 0

A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die. Votes: 0

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint. Votes: 0

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has noprescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. Votes: 0

Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams. Votes: 0

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism. Votes: 0

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it. Votes: 0

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart. Votes: 0

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles. Votes: 0

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. Votes: 0

Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals Votes: 0

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling. Votes: 0

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour? Votes: 0

We are always getting ready to live but never living. Votes: 0

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Votes: 0

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. Votes: 0

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir. Votes: 0

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existance of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Votes: 0

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed Votes: 0

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect. Votes: 0

The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person. Votes: 0

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. Votes: 0

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time. Votes: 0

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out. Votes: 0

Genius always finds itself a century too early. Votes: 0

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Votes: 0

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart. Votes: 0

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun. Votes: 0

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. Votes: 0

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society. Votes: 0

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization. Votes: 0

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself. Votes: 0

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself. Votes: 0

Of cheerfulness, or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains. Votes: 0

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. Votes: 0

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. Votes: 0

Law of Contrariness: Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it. Votes: 0

It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day. Votes: 0

Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it. Votes: 0

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. Votes: 0

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. Votes: 0

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. Votes: 0

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing. Votes: 0

Every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? Votes: 0

The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Votes: 0

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books... Votes: 0

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. Votes: 0

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. Votes: 0

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. Votes: 0

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind? Votes: 0

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day. Votes: 0

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little. Votes: 0

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. Votes: 0

The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste. Votes: 0

Coal is a portable climate. Votes: 0

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. Votes: 0

The universe is represented in every one of it's particles. Everything is made of one hidden stuff. The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God appears with all His parts in every moss and cobweb. Votes: 0

The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery? Votes: 0

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer. Votes: 0

Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Votes: 0

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away. Votes: 0

I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ. Votes: 0

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence. Votes: 0

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. Votes: 0

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. Votes: 0

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense. Votes: 0

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." Votes: 0

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship. Votes: 0

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. Votes: 0

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Votes: 0

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. Votes: 0

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. Votes: 0

Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer. Votes: 0

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Votes: 0

Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation. Votes: 0

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. Votes: 0

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul. Votes: 0

Only by the supernatural is a man strong--only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist--nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral. Votes: 0

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist. Votes: 0

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. Votes: 0

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. Votes: 0

The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. Votes: 0

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men. Votes: 0

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories. Votes: 0

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape. Votes: 0

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Votes: 0

Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. Votes: 0

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Votes: 0

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. Votes: 0

No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them. Votes: 0

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Votes: 0

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent. Votes: 0

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light. Votes: 0

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan. Votes: 0

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy. Votes: 0

The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. Votes: 0

Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Votes: 0

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation. Votes: 0

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. Votes: 0

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold Votes: 0

Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities. Votes: 0

To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. Votes: 0

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. Votes: 0

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Votes: 0

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it. Votes: 0

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Votes: 0

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one. Votes: 0

More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. Votes: 0

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods. Votes: 0

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. Votes: 0

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that. Votes: 0

The only way to have a friend is to be one. Votes: 0

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. Votes: 0

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Votes: 0

Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Votes: 0

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes. Votes: 0

A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine. Votes: 0

It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it. Votes: 0

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. Votes: 0

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. Votes: 0

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes. Votes: 0

A man in debt is so far a slave. Votes: 0

Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Votes: 0

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. Votes: 0

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Votes: 0

Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul. Votes: 0

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. Votes: 0

We boil at different degrees. Votes: 0

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter. Votes: 0

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you. Votes: 0

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without. Votes: 0

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Votes: 0

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. Votes: 0

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. Votes: 0

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Votes: 0

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. Votes: 0

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency. Votes: 0

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. Votes: 0

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way. Votes: 0

In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. Votes: 0

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not. Votes: 0

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life. Votes: 0

The dice of God are always loaded. Votes: 0

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. Votes: 0

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd. Votes: 0

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive. Votes: 0

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth. Votes: 0

A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth. Votes: 0

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him. Votes: 0

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old. Votes: 0

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss. Votes: 0

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot. Votes: 0

What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. Votes: 0

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. Votes: 0

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats. Votes: 0

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. Votes: 0

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Votes: 0

The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity. Votes: 0

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives. Votes: 0

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first. Votes: 0

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Votes: 0

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. Votes: 0

America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine providence on behalf of the human race. Votes: 0

Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each other. Votes: 0

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew. Votes: 0

The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. Votes: 0

Don't ever give up on something or someone that you can't go a full day without thinking about. Votes: 0

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. Votes: 0

Every wall is a door. Votes: 0

God enters by a private door into every individual. Votes: 0

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it. Votes: 0

God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation. Votes: 0

Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. Votes: 0

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true. Votes: 0

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes. Votes: 0

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. Votes: 0

Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. Votes: 0

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. Votes: 0

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Learn from it... tomorrow is a new day. Votes: 0

Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. Votes: 0

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. Votes: 0

He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity. Votes: 0

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Votes: 0

Literature is eavesdropping. Votes: 0

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. Votes: 0

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son. Votes: 0

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. Votes: 0

The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator. Votes: 0

An empire is an immense egotism. Votes: 0

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. Votes: 0

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm. Votes: 0

The laws of light and of heat translate each other;-so do the laws of sound and colour; and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy. Votes: 0

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief. Votes: 0

The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas. Votes: 0

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. Votes: 0

Each is liable to panic, which is exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting again. Votes: 0

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. Votes: 0

The world belongs to the energetic. Votes: 0

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. Votes: 0

A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean. Votes: 0

A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. Votes: 0

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement. Votes: 0

This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name,--this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. Votes: 0

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light. Votes: 0

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Votes: 0

London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. Votes: 0

But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man. Votes: 0

It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs. Votes: 0

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Votes: 0

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs. Votes: 0

God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Votes: 0

Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore Votes: 0

A deep man believes that the evil eye can whither, the heart's blessing can heal, and that love can overcome all odds.... Votes: 0

There is no one who does not exaggerate! Votes: 0

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function. Votes: 0

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. Votes: 0

Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. Votes: 0

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. Votes: 0

An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone. Votes: 0

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within. Votes: 0

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. Votes: 0

When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. Votes: 0

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. Votes: 0

The years teach much which the days never know. Votes: 0

All life is an experiment. Votes: 0

There is hope in extravagance, there is none in routine. Votes: 0

I am become a transparent eyeball... Votes: 0

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. Votes: 0

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics. Votes: 0

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred. Votes: 0

Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness. Votes: 0

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense. Votes: 0

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer. Votes: 0

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get. Votes: 0

Whatever limits us we call fate. Votes: 0

The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream. Votes: 0

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth. Votes: 0

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. Votes: 0

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. Votes: 0

Life is a festival only to the wise. Votes: 0

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. Votes: 0

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery. Votes: 0

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles. Votes: 0

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. Votes: 0

Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me. Votes: 0

How much finer things are in composition than alone. Votes: 0

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages Votes: 0

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Votes: 0

An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Votes: 0

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. Votes: 0

The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Votes: 0

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored Votes: 0

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act. Votes: 0

I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant. Votes: 0

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions. Votes: 0

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Votes: 0

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. Votes: 0

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. Votes: 0

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-borne treasures home. Votes: 0

A skillful man reads his dreams for self-knowledge, yet not the details but the quality Votes: 0

Success in your work, the finding a better method, the better understanding that insures the better performing is hat and coat, is food and wine, is fire and horse and health and holiday. At least, I find that any success in my work has the effect on my spirits of all these. Votes: 0

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons. Votes: 0

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. Votes: 0

Children are all foreigners. Votes: 0

Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper. Votes: 0

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great. Votes: 0

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality. Votes: 0

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Votes: 0

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong. Votes: 0

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. Votes: 0

Language is fossil Poetry. Votes: 0

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all. Votes: 0

Fractures well cured make us more strong. Votes: 0

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon. Votes: 0

Frankness invites frankness. Votes: 0

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Votes: 0

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Votes: 0

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated. Votes: 0

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know. Votes: 0

Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped. Votes: 0

By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one. Votes: 0

A man often pays dear for a small frugality. Votes: 0

You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Votes: 0

Insist upon yourself. Be original. Votes: 0

Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares Votes: 0

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite. Votes: 0

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. Votes: 0

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. Votes: 0

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate. Votes: 0

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. Votes: 0

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck. Votes: 0

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes. Votes: 0

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life. Votes: 0

Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement. Votes: 0

Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show. Votes: 0

It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage ofsociety; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own. Votes: 0

The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute. Votes: 0

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep. Votes: 0

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding. Votes: 0

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified. Votes: 0

Love is the essence of God.... Votes: 0

A man is a little thing while he works by and for himself; but when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, he is godlike.... Votes: 0

Calmness is always godlike. Votes: 0

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. Votes: 0

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting. Votes: 0

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart. Votes: 0

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don't follow through. Votes: 0

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Votes: 0

A good intention clothes itself with power. Votes: 0

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. Votes: 0

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Votes: 0

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Votes: 0

Good nature is stronger than tomahawks. Votes: 0

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet. Votes: 0

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off. Votes: 0

The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all. Votes: 0

A man will be eloquent if you give him good wine. Votes: 0

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go. Votes: 0

In good writing, words become one with things. Votes: 0

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad. Votes: 0

The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury. Votes: 0

It is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe. 'Tis a long scale from the gorilla to the gentleman,--from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare,--to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summit of science, art, and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is an always accelerated march. Votes: 0

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice. Votes: 0

People only see what they are prepared to see. If you look for what is good and what you can be grateful for you will find it everywhere. Votes: 0

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. Votes: 0

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. Votes: 0

In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us. Votes: 0

Our chief want in life, is, someone who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great. Votes: 0

The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water. Votes: 0

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself. Votes: 0

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. Votes: 0

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I mock at the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretch'd beneath the pines When the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride of man, At the Sophist's schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet? Votes: 0

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. Votes: 0

Sorrow makes us all children again. Votes: 0

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day. Votes: 0

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. Votes: 0

Fame is proof that the people are gullible. Votes: 0

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. Votes: 0

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Votes: 0

Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Votes: 0

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid. Votes: 0

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. Votes: 0

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men. Votes: 0

I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking. Votes: 0

Love, and you shall be loved. Votes: 0

When a happy person comes into the room, it is as if another candle has been lit. Votes: 0

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend. Votes: 0

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. Votes: 0

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time. Votes: 0

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. Votes: 0

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste. Votes: 0

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws. Votes: 0

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. Votes: 0

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, - an open and noble temper. Votes: 0

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch... Votes: 0

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.' Votes: 0

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. Votes: 0

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue. Votes: 0

Say, what other metre is it Than the meeting of the eyes? Nature poureth into nature Through the channels of that feature Riding on the ray of sight, Fleeter far than whirlwinds go, Or for service, or delight, Hearts to hearts their meaning show. Votes: 0

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true. Votes: 0

You cannot sincerely try to help another without helping yourself Votes: 0

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Votes: 0

Self trust is the essence of heroism. Votes: 0

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires. Votes: 0

The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Votes: 0

Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol. Votes: 0

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. Votes: 0

To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will... Votes: 0

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. Votes: 0

In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Votes: 0

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing. Votes: 0

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Votes: 0

Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking; some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into. Votes: 0

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity. Votes: 0

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is readyto sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! Votes: 0

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. Votes: 0

The house is a castle which the King cannot enter. Votes: 0

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought. Votes: 0

Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds. Votes: 0

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. Votes: 0

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. Votes: 0

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him! Votes: 0

A great man is always willing to be little. Votes: 0

Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement. Votes: 0

Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dewdrops, - but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles. Votes: 0

A fly is as untamable as a hyena. Votes: 0

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins Votes: 0

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear. Votes: 0

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. Votes: 0

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else. Votes: 0

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream. Votes: 0

That man is idle who can do something better. Votes: 0

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. Votes: 0

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry. Votes: 0

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery. Votes: 0

But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. Votes: 0

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might. Votes: 0

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. Votes: 0

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for. Votes: 0

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. Votes: 0

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Votes: 0

The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees. Votes: 0

Every man is an impossibility until he is born. Votes: 0

The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. Votes: 0

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking. Votes: 0

God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications. Votes: 0

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. Votes: 0

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Votes: 0

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Votes: 0

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world. Votes: 0

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? Votes: 0

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels. Votes: 0

Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit. Votes: 0

The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and so true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. Votes: 0

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Votes: 0

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it. Votes: 0

The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance. Votes: 0

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power. Votes: 0

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us Votes: 0

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. Votes: 0

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor. Votes: 0

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. Votes: 0

There is really no insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose. Votes: 0

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free. Votes: 0

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Votes: 0

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other. Votes: 0

We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education. Votes: 0

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. Votes: 0

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. Votes: 0

Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law. Votes: 0

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Votes: 0

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales. Votes: 0

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Votes: 0

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Votes: 0

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows. Votes: 0

It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past Votes: 0

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. Votes: 0

The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. Votes: 0

When you strike at a king, you must kill him. Votes: 0

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate. Votes: 0

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature. Votes: 0

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Football is four 15-minute quarters. Plus timeouts and commercials. Votes: 0

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. Votes: 0

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water. Votes: 0

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. Votes: 0

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,--so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose. Votes: 0

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside. Votes: 0

But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. Votes: 0

Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Votes: 0

My garden is a forest ledge Which older forest s bound; The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, Then plunge to depths profound! Votes: 0

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. Votes: 0

Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it. Votes: 0

Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied. Votes: 0

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning. Votes: 0

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries. Votes: 0

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Votes: 0

Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide. Votes: 0

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society. Votes: 0

Life is too short to waste. Votes: 0

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes. Votes: 0

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short. Votes: 0

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. Votes: 0

If you would lift me up, you've got to be on higher ground. Votes: 0

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. Votes: 0

In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours. Votes: 0

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein. Votes: 0

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too. Votes: 0

Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. Votes: 0

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. Votes: 0

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. Votes: 0

My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. Votes: 0

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Votes: 0

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. Votes: 0

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself. Votes: 0

Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much. Votes: 0

Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up Votes: 0

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. Votes: 0

Women see through Claude Lorraines. Votes: 0

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. Votes: 0

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. Votes: 0

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. Votes: 0

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day. Votes: 0

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love. Votes: 0

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me. Votes: 0

I DO not count the hours I spend In wandering by the sea; The forest is my loyal friend, Like God it useth me. Votes: 0

The forest is my loyal friend A Delphic shrine to me. Votes: 0

Shallow men believe in luck. Votes: 0

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic. Votes: 0

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. Votes: 0

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. Votes: 0

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. Votes: 0

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. Votes: 0

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. Votes: 0

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Votes: 0

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. Votes: 0

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Votes: 0

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered. Votes: 0

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Votes: 0

Come, see the north-wind's masonry, Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he For number or proportion. Votes: 0

Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth. Votes: 0

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. Votes: 0

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. Votes: 0

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. Votes: 0

An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. Votes: 0

Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. Votes: 0

Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. Votes: 0

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. Votes: 0

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. mettle: spirited bottom: capacity to endure strain Votes: 0

The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few. Votes: 0

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe. Votes: 0

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. Votes: 0

Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character; after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives. Votes: 0

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand. Votes: 0

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. Votes: 0

Art is a jealous mistress. Votes: 0

Moderation in all things, especially moderation. Votes: 0

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. Votes: 0

In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame. Votes: 0

Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes. Votes: 0

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone. Votes: 0

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Votes: 0

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Votes: 0

Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free. Votes: 0

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy. Votes: 0

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people. Votes: 0

Men are what their mothers made them. Votes: 0

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. Votes: 0

The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Votes: 0

There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins. Votes: 0

Great thoughts ensure musical expression. Votes: 0

My angel,-his name is Freedom,- Choose him to be your king; He shall cut pathways east and west, And fend you with his wing. Votes: 0

I can find my biography in every fable that I read. Votes: 0

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat "I will not love you." Votes: 0

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. Votes: 0

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. Votes: 0

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you? Votes: 0

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites. Votes: 0

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. Votes: 0

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere Votes: 0

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson Votes: 0

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. Votes: 0

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs. Votes: 0

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. Votes: 0

It all begins when the soul would have its way with you. Votes: 0

A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. Votes: 0

Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely Votes: 0

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Votes: 0

New York is a sucked orange. Votes: 0

The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessylearns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served. Votes: 0

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. Votes: 0

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames. Votes: 0

Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. Votes: 0

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity. Votes: 0

But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. Votes: 0

The Nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. Votes: 0

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. Votes: 0

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles. Votes: 0

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own. Votes: 0

Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.' Votes: 0

We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys. Votes: 0

The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them. Votes: 0

Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me. Votes: 0

The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men. Votes: 0

God is Unity, but always works in variety. Votes: 0

America is another name for opportunity. Votes: 0

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. Votes: 0

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody. Votes: 0

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is. Votes: 0

There is no true orator who is not a hero. Votes: 0

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? Votes: 0

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it Votes: 0

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it. Votes: 0

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. Votes: 0

The horseman serves the horse, The neat-herd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind, Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. Votes: 0

The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children. Votes: 0

Hither rolls the storm of heat; I feel its finer billows beat Like a sea which me infolds; Heat with viewless fingers moulds, Swells, and mellows, and matures, Paints, and flavors, and allures, Bird and brier inly warms, Still enriches and transforms, Gives the reed and lily length, Adds to oak and oxen strength, Transforming what it doth infold, Life out of death, new out of old. Votes: 0

The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence. Votes: 0

Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Votes: 0

Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear. Votes: 0

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head. Votes: 0

Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? Votes: 0

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. Votes: 0

The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight. Votes: 0

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Votes: 0

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone. Votes: 0

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. Votes: 0

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action. Votes: 0

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being. Votes: 0

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries. Votes: 0

There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat. Votes: 0

It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best. Votes: 0

The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line. Votes: 0

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose. Votes: 0

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys. Votes: 0

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Votes: 0

I like the church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Votes: 0

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- "'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die." Votes: 0

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself. Votes: 0

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. Votes: 0

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased. Votes: 0

The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries. Votes: 0

The pest of society is egotists. Votes: 0

Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them. Votes: 0

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought. Votes: 0

It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. Votes: 0

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong Votes: 0

Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists. Votes: 0

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end. Votes: 0

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Votes: 0

Genius Borrows nobly. Votes: 0

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line. Votes: 0

There the great Planter plants Of fruitful worlds the grain, And with a million spells enchants The souls that walk in pain. Votes: 0

Contemporary American psychiatrist It is a happy talent to know how to play. Votes: 0

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place. Votes: 0

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old. Votes: 0

Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine. Votes: 0

The surest poison is time. Votes: 0

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. Votes: 0

It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated. Votes: 0

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses. Votes: 0

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time. Votes: 0

Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub. Votes: 0

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. Votes: 0

I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy. Votes: 0

Practice makes perfect - the sooner you start, the sooner you will be a happy nonsmoker Votes: 0

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life. Votes: 0

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. Votes: 0

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. Votes: 0

The world is his who can see through its pretension. Votes: 0

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension. Votes: 0

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. Votes: 0

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Votes: 0

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists. Votes: 0

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. Votes: 0

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back. Votes: 0

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Votes: 0

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. Votes: 0

As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points. Votes: 0

If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. Votes: 0

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. Votes: 0

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread. Votes: 0

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. Votes: 0

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future. Votes: 0

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made. Votes: 0

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without. Votes: 0

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. Votes: 0

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. Votes: 0

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry. Votes: 0

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson Votes: 0

Our thinking is a pious reception. Votes: 0

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. Votes: 0

In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown. Votes: 0

There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress Votes: 0

Every reform was once a private opinion. Votes: 0

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. Votes: 0

When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are. Votes: 0

Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live. Votes: 0

As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world Votes: 0

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. Votes: 0

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. Votes: 0

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. Votes: 0

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Votes: 0

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. Votes: 0

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Votes: 0

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Votes: 0

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Votes: 0

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. Votes: 0

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to seserve that you should. Votes: 0

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. Votes: 0

In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Votes: 0

If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration. Votes: 0

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations. Votes: 0

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration. Votes: 0

Men are respectable only as they respect. Votes: 0

Rude poets of the tavern hearth, squandering your unquoted mirth, which keeps the ground, and never soars, while jake retorts, and reuben roars; tough and screaming, as birch-bark, goes like bullet to its mark; while the solid curse and jeer never balk the waiting ear. Votes: 0

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours. Votes: 0

If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. Votes: 0

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind. Votes: 0

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Votes: 0

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals. Votes: 0

All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle. Votes: 0

A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. Votes: 0

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither. Votes: 0

The river knows the way to the sea: Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity. Votes: 0

Continual failure is a road to success - if you have the strength to go on. Votes: 0

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues. Votes: 0

For each thorn, there's a rosebud... For each twilight - a dawn... For each trial - the strength to carry on, For each storm cloud - a rainbow... For each shadow - the sun... For each parting - sweet memories when sorrow is done. Votes: 0

Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told: Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow And through the wind-piled snowdrift The warm rosebuds below. Votes: 0

O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched. Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth. Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair. Votes: 0

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder. Votes: 0

Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail. Votes: 0

The Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman added the shirt. Votes: 0

A man is a god in ruins. Votes: 0

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come. Votes: 0

Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back. Votes: 0

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine Votes: 0

To laugh often and much to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children to leave the world a better placevto know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. Votes: 0

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success Votes: 0

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited Votes: 0

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods Votes: 0

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm Votes: 0

Flowers are the earth laughing Votes: 0

All diseases run into one, old age Votes: 0

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist Votes: 0

Discontent is want of self-reliance it is infirmity of will Votes: 0

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing Votes: 0

Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy Votes: 0

Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities Votes: 0

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense Votes: 0

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet Votes: 0

I can find my biography in every fable that I read Votes: 0

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes Votes: 0

Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time Votes: 0

America is another name for opportunity Votes: 0

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. Votes: 0

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it. Votes: 0

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding Votes: 0

He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry. Votes: 0

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. Votes: 0

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. Votes: 0

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances. Votes: 0

Fame is proof that people are gullible. Votes: 0

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? Votes: 0

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. Votes: 0

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. Votes: 0

Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage. Votes: 0

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings. Votes: 0

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine. Votes: 0

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today. Votes: 0

Whatever you do you need courage.Whatever course you decide upon, there will always be someone to tell you that you are wrong. Votes: 0

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. Votes: 0

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else. Votes: 0

Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold Votes: 0

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches. Votes: 0

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. Votes: 0

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended. Votes: 0

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. Votes: 0

The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. Votes: 0

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore. Votes: 0

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. Votes: 0

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. Votes: 0

there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are. Votes: 0

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. Votes: 0

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. Votes: 0

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule. Votes: 0

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. Votes: 0

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. Votes: 0

The student is to read history actively not passively. Votes: 0

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. Votes: 0

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul Votes: 0

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. Votes: 0

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this. Votes: 0

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship Votes: 0

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast. Votes: 0

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Votes: 0

Reality is a sliding door. Votes: 0

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year. Votes: 0

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret. Votes: 0

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. Votes: 0

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. Votes: 0

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. Votes: 0

Every artist was first an amateur. Votes: 0

The Artist always has the masters in his eyes. Votes: 0

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible Votes: 0

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men--that is genius. Votes: 0

The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. Votes: 0

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. Votes: 0

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. Votes: 0

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Votes: 0

The life of truth is cold. Votes: 0

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none. Votes: 0

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Votes: 0

What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Votes: 0

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none. Votes: 0

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints. Votes: 0

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. Votes: 0

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Votes: 0

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. Votes: 0

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. Votes: 0

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness. Votes: 0

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn Votes: 0

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. Votes: 0

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it Votes: 0

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. Votes: 0

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Votes: 0

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. Votes: 0

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep. Votes: 0

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same Votes: 0

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts~? Votes: 0

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me Votes: 0

If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that.Mentioned inSixty Days and Counting, by Kim Stanley Robinson Votes: 0

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul Votes: 0

The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature. Votes: 0

Every natural action is graceful. Votes: 0

Self-trust is the first secret of success. Votes: 0

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus. Votes: 0

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find. Votes: 0

Things refuse to be mismanaged for long. Votes: 0

I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. Votes: 0

There is always safety in valor. Votes: 0

It is time to be old To take in sail. Votes: 0

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. Votes: 0

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. Votes: 0

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness. Votes: 0

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. Votes: 0

The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect. Votes: 0

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. Votes: 0

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation. Votes: 0

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Votes: 0

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. Votes: 0

The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind. Votes: 0

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Votes: 0

Without electricity, the air would rot. Votes: 0

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints Votes: 0

Nothing external to you has any power over you. Votes: 0

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune. Votes: 0

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle. Votes: 0

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. Votes: 0

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself. Votes: 0

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. Votes: 0

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius. Votes: 0

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. Votes: 0

Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow. Votes: 0

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. Votes: 0

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. Votes: 0

Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful Votes: 0

We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company. Votes: 0

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. Votes: 0

All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. Votes: 0

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine. Votes: 0

Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market. Votes: 0

Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever. Votes: 0

The true ship is the ship builder. Votes: 0

Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable. Votes: 0

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. Votes: 0

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue. Votes: 0

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods. Votes: 0

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. Votes: 0

If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Votes: 0

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay Votes: 0

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization. Votes: 0

I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom. Votes: 0

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay. Votes: 0

A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country. Votes: 0

Foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of small minds! Votes: 0

The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Votes: 0

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Votes: 0

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both. Votes: 0

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation. Votes: 0

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation. Votes: 0

Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. Votes: 0

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions. Votes: 0

Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing. Votes: 0

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul Votes: 0

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good. Votes: 0

All my hurts my garden spade can heal. Votes: 0

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Votes: 0

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. Votes: 0

And striving to be Man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. Votes: 0

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism. Votes: 0

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world. Votes: 0

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. Votes: 0

Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods! Votes: 0

What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed. Votes: 0

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Votes: 0

Sitting back in the evening, stargazing and stroking your dog, is an infallible remedy. Votes: 0

Hitch your wagon to a star. Votes: 0

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. Votes: 0

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. Votes: 0

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. Votes: 0

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now. Votes: 0

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Votes: 0

But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. Votes: 0

The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors. Votes: 0

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds. Votes: 0

The dearest events are summer-rain. Votes: 0

Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. Votes: 0

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn Votes: 0

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. Votes: 0

God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical. Votes: 0

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. Votes: 0

Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Votes: 0

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. Votes: 0

We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. Votes: 0

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms; a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch. Votes: 0

How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public. Votes: 0

There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row. Votes: 0

The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams. Votes: 0

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial. Votes: 0

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. Votes: 0

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea. Votes: 0

Excellence is the new forever. Votes: 0

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste. Votes: 0

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or Votes: 0

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance. Votes: 0

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men. Votes: 0

Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. Votes: 0

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Votes: 0

This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays. Votes: 0

Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. Votes: 0

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. Votes: 0

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower Votes: 0

Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One can not be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Votes: 0

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. Votes: 0

There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live. Votes: 0

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. Votes: 0

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco. Votes: 0

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. Votes: 0

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic andfood for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us to just relations with men and things. Votes: 0

Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places. Votes: 0

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. Votes: 0

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment. Votes: 0

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more. Votes: 0

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. Votes: 0

Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman. Votes: 0

But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age isworth a fit of insanity, is it not? Votes: 0

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. Votes: 0

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power. Votes: 0

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told. Votes: 0

Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight. Votes: 0

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances. Votes: 0

Our distrust is very expensive. Votes: 0

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh. Votes: 0

Deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. Votes: 0

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle Votes: 0

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation. Votes: 0

Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one. Votes: 0

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years? Votes: 0

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly. Votes: 0

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Votes: 0

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them. Votes: 0

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. Votes: 0

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self control is the rule. Anger is an uncontrollable feeling that betrays what you are when you are not yourself. Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire. Votes: 0

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit. Votes: 0

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. Votes: 0

O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy. Votes: 0

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Votes: 0

I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Votes: 0

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God. Votes: 0

Pictures must not be too picturesque. Votes: 0

I think no virtue goes with size;The reason of all cowardiceIs, that men are overgrown,And, to be valiant, must come downTo the titmouse dimension. Votes: 0

Valor consists in the power of self recovery. Votes: 0

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind. Votes: 0

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking. Votes: 0

The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence. Votes: 0

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face. Votes: 0

When there is no vision, people perish. Votes: 0

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. Votes: 0

The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. Votes: 0

Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? Votes: 0

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web. Votes: 0

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. Votes: 0

Our strength grows out of our weakness. Votes: 0

In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Votes: 0

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. Votes: 0

Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquillity that religion is powerless to bestow. Votes: 0

A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical or fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times. Votes: 0

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout... Votes: 0

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. Votes: 0

After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk. Votes: 0

A man's wife has more power over him than the state has. Votes: 0

Love is like wildflowers; It's often found in the most unlikely places. Votes: 0

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessedno other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,--Will it bake bread? Votes: 0

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. Votes: 0

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. Votes: 0

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. Votes: 0

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. Votes: 0

In the woods we return to reason and faith. Votes: 0

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters. Votes: 0

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet. Votes: 0

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. Votes: 0

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles. Votes: 0

A walk in the woods is only an exalted dream. Votes: 0

If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes. Votes: 0

The man in the street does not know a star in the sky. Votes: 0

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. Votes: 0

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell. Votes: 0

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. Votes: 0

We must be our own before we can be another's. Votes: 0

Revolutions go not backward. Votes: 0

If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Votes: 0

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless. Votes: 0

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers. Votes: 0

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent. Votes: 0

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports. Votes: 0

A good indignation brings out all one's powers. Votes: 0

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols. Votes: 0

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Votes: 0

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams. Votes: 0

Earth laughs in flowers. Votes: 0

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. Votes: 0

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. Votes: 0

Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying. Votes: 0

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe. Votes: 0

What is a farm but a mute gospel? Votes: 0

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught. Votes: 0

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. Votes: 0

Life is our dictionary. Votes: 0

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self? Votes: 0

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. Votes: 0

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us. Votes: 0

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. Votes: 0

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Votes: 0

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Votes: 0

What you are comes to you. Votes: 0

Money often costs too much. Votes: 0

"Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother." Votes: 0

"In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life~~no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair." Votes: 0

"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try." Votes: 0

...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them. Votes: 0

...in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in the streets or villages...in the woods we return to reason and faith. Votes: 0

...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. Votes: 0

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Votes: 0

...What torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived? and may never! Votes: 0

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.... Votes: 0

[D]ivine Providence... keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul... Votes: 0

[Gratitude is] the cheerfulness of wisdom. Votes: 0

[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself. Votes: 0

[T]omorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well & serenely, & with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day ... is too dear with its hopes & invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays. Votes: 0

[The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting. Votes: 0

[Whenever the average intellect of the clergy declines in the balance with the average intellect of the people] the churches will be shut up and a new order of things [will] begin. Votes: 0

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts. Votes: 0

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Votes: 0

A beautiful woman is a practical poet. Votes: 0

A believer, a mind whose faith is consciousness, is never disturbed because other persons do not yet see the fact which he sees. Votes: 0

A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit. Votes: 0

A bullet had found him, his blood ran out as he cried. No money could save him, so he laid down and died. Ooh, what a lucky man he was. Votes: 0

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. Votes: 0

A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained. Votes: 0

A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture. Votes: 0

A child convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. The reward for a thing well done, is to have done it. Votes: 0

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. Votes: 0

A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Votes: 0

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works. Votes: 0

A day is a miniature eternity. Votes: 0

A determined man, by his very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins to conquer. Votes: 0

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway. Votes: 0

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart. Votes: 0

A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. Votes: 0

A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out. Votes: 0

A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds. Votes: 0

A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain. Votes: 0

A forte always makes a foible. Votes: 0

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. Votes: 0

A friend is the hope of the heart. Votes: 0

A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation. Votes: 0

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Votes: 0

A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. Votes: 0

A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction. Votes: 0

A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Votes: 0

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Votes: 0

A good indignation makes an excellent speech. Votes: 0

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind. Votes: 0

A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse. Votes: 0

a good reader makes a good book Votes: 0

A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands. Votes: 0

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us. Votes: 0

A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. Votes: 0

A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. Votes: 0

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man. Votes: 0

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great. Votes: 0

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. Votes: 0

A great teacher makes hard things easy. Votes: 0

A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level. Votes: 0

A hero is a man who is afraid to run away. Votes: 0

A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought. Votes: 0

A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults. Votes: 0

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. Votes: 0

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text. Votes: 0

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong . . . . Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Votes: 0

A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams. Votes: 0

A little integrity is better than any career. Votes: 0

A little praise goes a great ways. Votes: 0

A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time Votes: 0

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life. Votes: 0

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius. Votes: 0

A man cannot speak but he judges himself Votes: 0

A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty. Votes: 0

A man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his competitors. Votes: 0

A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again. Votes: 0

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants. Votes: 0

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. Votes: 0

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. Votes: 0

A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself. Votes: 0

A man in the wrong may more easily be convinced than one half right. Votes: 0

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession. Votes: 0

A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool. Votes: 0

A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for 10 minutes longer. Votes: 0

A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. Votes: 0

A man is known by the books he reads. Votes: 0

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced. Votes: 0

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it. Votes: 0

A man is related to all nature. Votes: 0

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue. Votes: 0

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. Votes: 0

A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. Votes: 0

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Votes: 0

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill. Votes: 0

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule. Votes: 0

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them. Votes: 0

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched. Votes: 0

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. Votes: 0

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Votes: 0

A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs. Votes: 0

A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature. Votes: 0

A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. Votes: 0

A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as tolame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side. Votes: 0

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness. Votes: 0

A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on. Votes: 0

A man of no conversation should smoke. Votes: 0

A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow. Votes: 0

A man should carry nature in his head. Votes: 0

A man should give us a sense of mass. Votes: 0

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. Votes: 0

A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. Votes: 0

A man's action is only a poicture book of his creed. Votes: 0

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms. Votes: 0

A man's library is a sort of harem. Votes: 0

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men. Votes: 0

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. Votes: 0

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices. Votes: 0

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,"” congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation. Votes: 0

A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. Votes: 0

A mob is a society obodies, voluntarily bereaving themselves oreason, and traversing its work. The mob is man, voluntarily descending to the nature othe beast. Its fit hour oactivity is night; its actions are insane, like its whole constitution. Votes: 0

A moment is a concentrated eternity. Votes: 0

A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray. Votes: 0

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is set above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. Votes: 0

A nation never falls but by suicide. Votes: 0

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock. Votes: 0

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price. Votes: 0

A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Votes: 0

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree. Votes: 0

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude... Votes: 0

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul. Votes: 0

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Votes: 0

A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless. I want to devote my limited life to serving the people limitlessly. Votes: 0

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Votes: 0

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn. Votes: 0

A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time. Votes: 0

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised andshocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted. Votes: 0

A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. Votes: 0

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays. Votes: 0

A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us. Votes: 0

A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips. Votes: 0

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. Votes: 0

A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know. Votes: 0

A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. Votes: 0

A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented. Votes: 0

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking. Votes: 0

A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. Votes: 0

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. Votes: 0

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant. Votes: 0

A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will. Votes: 0

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. Votes: 0

A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love. Votes: 0

A system-grinder hates the truth. Votes: 0

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. Votes: 0

A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Votes: 0

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection. Votes: 0

A weed is a plant we've found no use for yet. Votes: 0

A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known. Votes: 0

A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. Votes: 0

A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion. Votes: 0

A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness. Votes: 0

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Votes: 0

Ability without honor has no value. Votes: 0

Accept your genius and say what you think. Votes: 0

Accuracy is essential to beauty. Votes: 0

Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness. Votes: 0

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Votes: 0

Activity is contagious. Votes: 0

Add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame... Votes: 0

Adult males are what their moms designed them. Votes: 0

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death. Votes: 0

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection. Votes: 0

Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Votes: 0

Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten? Votes: 0

Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches. Votes: 0

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean. Votes: 0

All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone. Votes: 0

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man. Votes: 0

All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light, is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,--an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. Votes: 0

All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Votes: 0

All great men come out of the middle classes. Votes: 0

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties. Votes: 0

All great successes are the triumph of persistence. Votes: 0

All high beauty has a moral element in it. Votes: 0

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. Votes: 0

All history is biography. Votes: 0

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man. Votes: 0

All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains. Votes: 0

All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. Votes: 0

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear. Votes: 0

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished-by fear...be honest with a man and you have no fear. Try to deceive and the relationship deteriorates. Votes: 0

All life is a nap. The more naps you take the better. Votes: 0

All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know. Votes: 0

All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Votes: 0

All men are poets at heart. Votes: 0

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes. Votes: 0

All men in the abstract are just and good. Votes: 0

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves. Votes: 0

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being. Votes: 0

All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Votes: 0

All necessary truth is its own evidence. Votes: 0

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority. Votes: 0

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us. Votes: 0

All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times. Votes: 0

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength. Votes: 0

All promise outruns performance. Votes: 0

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Votes: 0

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey. Votes: 0

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. Votes: 0

All science is transcendental or else passes away. Votes: 0

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal. Votes: 0

All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life. Votes: 0

All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. Votes: 0

All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world. Votes: 0

All that can be done for you is nothing to what you can do for yourself. Votes: 0

All the devils respect virtue. Votes: 0

All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become big masters. Votes: 0

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning. Votes: 0

All the great ages have been ages of belief. Votes: 0

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view. Votes: 0

All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of man's limbs and senses. Votes: 0

All the world loves a lover. Votes: 0

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly. Votes: 0

All things are known to the soul. Votes: 0

All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. Votes: 0

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Votes: 0

All vigor is contagious. Votes: 0

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power. Votes: 0

All writing comes by the grace of God. Votes: 0

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words. Votes: 0

Allow yourself to trust joy and embrace it. You will find you dance with everything. Votes: 0

Almost every man we meet requires some civility; requires to be humored; - he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. Votes: 0

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. Votes: 0

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other. Votes: 0

Always do what you are afraid to do. Votes: 0

Always maintain your common sense and artful skills, and funnel it all into plain enough dealings. Votes: 0

Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Votes: 0

Always scorn appearances and you always may. Votes: 0

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words. Votes: 0

America is a country of young men. Votes: 0

America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous. Votes: 0

America means opportunity, freedom, power. Votes: 0

American mind a wilderness of opportunities. Votes: 0

Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. Votes: 0

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times. Votes: 0

Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future Votes: 0

Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light, and know not whence it comes, and call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. Votes: 0

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. Votes: 0

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature. Votes: 0

An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel. Votes: 0

An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Votes: 0

An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe. Votes: 0

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese. Votes: 0

An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation. Votes: 0

An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Votes: 0

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact. Votes: 0

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. Votes: 0

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Votes: 0

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas. Votes: 0

An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures. Votes: 0

And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men. Votes: 0

And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it." MARTIN LUTHER, Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. Votes: 0

And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation. Votes: 0

And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done. What is useful will last, what is hurtful will sink. Votes: 0

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Votes: 0

And truly it demands something god like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others! Votes: 0

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization? Votes: 0

And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. Votes: 0

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship. Votes: 0

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward. Votes: 0

And yet--it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Votes: 0

And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim. Votes: 0

Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Votes: 0

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. Votes: 0

Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less. Votes: 0

Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do. Votes: 0

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes. Votes: 0

Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time. Votes: 0

Art is evidence of our most creative moment. Votes: 0

Art is the path of the creator to his work. Votes: 0

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist. Votes: 0

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. Votes: 0

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Votes: 0

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it. Votes: 0