Ralph Waldo Emerson

Works of great intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

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.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

Wisdom is to finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?

Who can ... guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Where there is no vision a people perish.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless!

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me. John Wesley

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

Whatever limits us, we call Fate.

When a man meets his make, society begins.

What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

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.

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

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and morning star.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.

We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.

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.

We never touch but at points.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves....

We have more than we use.

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

We do what we can, and then make up a theory to prove our performance the best.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

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

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

We are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where strength is born, we shun.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.

We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

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

We all live amid surfaces, and the true art is to skate well on them.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

Two man talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

To think is to act.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

To fill the hour that is happiness.

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

'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

This gives force to the strong that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Things have their laws as well as men; things refuse to be trifled with.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey.

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

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

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

There is no knowledge that is not power.

There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

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

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

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.

There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

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

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

The world we live in is but thickened light.

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.

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.

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

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

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

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

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

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

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

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.

The surest poison is time.

The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.

The soul's emphasis is always right.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

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

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

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

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

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

The religions we call false were once true.

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

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

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.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

The only prudence in life is concentration.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

The more reason, the less government.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

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

The man for whom the law exists the man of forms, the conservative is a tame man.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity,

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not seen if the eye is too near.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

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.

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

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

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

The finished man of the world must eat every apple once.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

The eye is easily frightened.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

The dice of God are always loaded.

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.

The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing where it abounds to where it is costly.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days & more of them, than any other country.

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

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.

The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

That man is idle who can do something better.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

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.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Striving is perhaps the one and only true elixir, for while we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

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?

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.... Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

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.

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

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

Society is a hospital of incurables.

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

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

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank.... Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay.

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.

Self command is the main discipline.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.

Sanity is not being subdued by your means.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman repose in energy.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

Reality is a sliding door.

Real action is in silent moments.

Proverbs are the sanctuary of the intuitions.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

Poverty consists in feeling poor.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

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

People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.

People say law but they mean wealth.

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

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

People are to be taken in very small doses.

Peace has its victories, but it takes a brave man to win them.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do, but inside, the terrible freedom!

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

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.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Our faith comes in moments ... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

One definition of man is 'an intelligence served by organs.'

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

Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it, which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

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

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby so helpless and so ridiculous.

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

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 own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

New York is a sucked orange.

New arts destroy the old.

Necessity does everything well.

Nature ... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Nature tells every secret once.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Nature hates calculators.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Nature encourages no looseness; pardons no errors.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

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.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.

Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.

Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.

Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

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.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive.

Live, let live, and help live.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Life too near paralyses art.

Life is a search after power.

Life is a progress, and not a station.

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

Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

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

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled.

Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.

Language is the archives of history.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

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.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

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

It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

It is only when the mind and character slumber that dress can be seen.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood....

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

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

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

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

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

Imitation is suicide.

If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.

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

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if has a headache.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

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

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

I didn't find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

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

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

Hospitality: a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

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.

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

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

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

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

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.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

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

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

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

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

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

As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

And fired the shot heard round the world.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

An empire is an immense egotism.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of man's limbs and senses.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?

All promise outruns performance.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightaway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. 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.

A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion.

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons.

The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.

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.

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.

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

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From Evils which never arrived!

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.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; 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.

The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work ... if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

'Work,' says Nature to man, 'in every hour, paid or unpaid; see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, 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: no matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.'

Work is victory.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

We are wiser than we know.

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

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness an open and noble temper.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

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

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.

What I must do is all that concerns me, and not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to look after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.

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. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

Speak with the vulgar, think with the wise.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

The highest virtue is always against the law.

Tart, cathartic virtue.

Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly ads to our power and enlarges our field of action.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

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.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Every great man is unique.

It is a luxury to be understood.

Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.

The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is 'Let there be truth between us two forevermore.'

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

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The less government we have the better.

He in whom the love of truth predominates ... submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth ... and respects the highest law of his being.

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

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.

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

Never utter the truism but live it among men.

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.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

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. [Miss C. F. Forbes, (18171911).]

Today is a king in disguise.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

When you strike a king, you must kill him.

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.

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To give of one's self; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived This is to have succeeded.

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.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

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.

This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half hour.

Well, said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], I suppose you have all there is.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbors creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

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.'

Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I saybut perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.

Our best thought come from others.

Great men are they who see that ... thoughts rule the world.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind.

The gates of thought, how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.

Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; -- The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

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.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.

What is the hardest thing in the world? To think.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike.

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.

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

The first and last lesson of religion is: The things that are seen are temporal; things that are unseen are eternal.

We boil at different degrees.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

Those are a success who have lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who have gained the respect of intelligent people and the love of children, who have filled their niche and accomplished their task, who leave the world better than they found it, whether by a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of the earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best they had.

Work::'I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

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

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

If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. [Mrs. Yule stated in The Docket, Feb. 1912, that she copied this in her handbook from a lecture delivered by Emerson. The mouse-trap quotation was the occasion of a long controversy, owing to Elbert Hubbards claim to its authorship.]

The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature.... 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.

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.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.

Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Sorrow makes us all children againdestroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

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.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Skill to do comes of doing.

Skepticism is slow suicide.

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

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Beware what you set your heart upon, for it surely shall be yours.

Self trust is the essence of heroism.

Self trust is the first secret of success.

Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

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

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

There is no defect except from within. There is no really insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose.

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. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to Aprils breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

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.

If you would not be known to do anything, never do it.

The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

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

Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

'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 unmistakably 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.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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.

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a 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.

For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

Pride ruined the angels.

As mens prayers are a disease of the will so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.

The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.

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

A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

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

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

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.

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

Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Patience and fortitude conquer all.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.

Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified.

Don't hang a dismal picture on the wall. Don't bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Every wall is a door.

The only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Never try to make anyone like yourself you know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.

One moment of a mans life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of all fiction.

Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist.

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

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

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

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

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Finish every 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; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. 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.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared ...

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

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

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.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

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

Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

A man is related to all nature.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world as invalids pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live: my life is for itself, and not for spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask for primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from a man to his actions.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, then that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.

But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.

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.

'Ah, so you shall be misunderstood.' Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagorus 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.

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

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement, a selecting principle, gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem.

Men are better than this theology.

The things taught in colleges and school are not an education but a means to an education.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out; and such as are out wish to get in?

We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at least a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

A man is a God in ruins.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a God playing the fool.

I like man, but not men.

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....

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.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

No man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; for everything you gain, you lose something else.

London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of today.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

O fair and stately maid, whose eyes Were kindled in the upper skies At the same torch that lighted mine.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

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.

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that.

Life is too short to waste ... Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

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

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

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

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

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

Good men must not obey laws too well.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

The angels are so enamoured 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 there be any who understand it or not.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Knowledge is an antidote to fear.

One mans justice is anothers injustice; one mans beauty anothers ugliness; one mans wisdom anpthers folly.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Our first mistake is the belief that circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.

Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

Invention breeds invention.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

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

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections as from the moral volitions.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laugther.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits; on his manhood; he has gained the facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

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

There is properly no history; only biography.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is 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 try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be common, nor the common heroic.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

Get Health. No labor, effort nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.

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

Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

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

Greatness:: The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

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.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Every man believes he has a greater possibility.

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

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

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

A great man is always willing to be little.

What your heart thinks great is great. The souls emphasis is always right.

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

The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o'er him planned.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant.

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!

The good rain, like the bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

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

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 against it.

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

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

The religion that is afraid of science dishoners God and commits suicide.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

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

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Our greatest glory consists not in falling, but in rising every time we fall.

THE POET 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: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.... In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

He is a good man who can receive a gift well.

The only gift is a portion of thyself ... the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb....

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 single will justify you now.

The gentleman is a man of truth.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Genius borrows nobly.

Genius has no taste for weaving sand.

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.

My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.

A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coatskirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Friendship demands the ability to do without it.

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.Friendship demands the ability to do without it.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Friends are like spaghetti, they should stick together. The only way to have a friend is to be one.

We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of allfriends?

For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

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

A forte always makes a foible.

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of a sympathetic life.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

A field cannot well be seen from within the field.

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.

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

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, Always do what you are afraid to do.

The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

The faith that stand on authority is not faith.

In the woods we return to reason and faith. Standing on the bare ground my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes.... The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.

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.

The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

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.

Extremes meet and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.

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 course, 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.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose. It is perfect in every moment of its existence.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

The excellent is new forever.

Excellence is new forever.

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

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

Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn from him.

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

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

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.

Earth laughs in flowers ...

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.

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.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

To live without duties is obscene.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

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

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

Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

The chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do the best we can.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good.... If we will take the good we find, ... we shall have heaping measures....

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.

Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.

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.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Cunning is strength withheld.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

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

Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

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

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

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.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

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.

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

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer.... He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

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.

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.

Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every up-springing plant of duty.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing.

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

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

The perception of a comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

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

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

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you pleaseyou can never have both.

As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.

There never was a child so lovely but his mother wasn't glad to get him asleep.

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

Children are all foreigners.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

Of cheerfulness, or a good temper the more it is spent, the more of it remains.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Each 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.

It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself, as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time.

Give all to love: Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the Muse, Nothing refuse.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in dreams.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying.

Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.

The force of character is cumulative.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

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

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.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

Books are for nothing but to inspire.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen librarya company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Blame is safer than praise.

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

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.

They conquer who believe they can.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

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

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

To the attentive eye each moment of the year has its own beauty and in the same field it beholds every hour a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

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.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

Be and not seem.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

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

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

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

Grow angry slowly there's plenty of time.

In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.

The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

The years teach much which the days never knew.

America is a country of young men.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, all duties even.

When it is dark enough, men see the stars.

Every advantage has its tax.

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.

What you are thunders so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say. What you do rings so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say.

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

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

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,

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.

Every man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value.

When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science, but its flank my be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation, nor the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.

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

Self Esteem::'It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

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 not only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

I pay the schoolmaster, but tis the school boys that educate my son.

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, 'Tis mans perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.'

Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if unmixed.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues.

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. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

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

Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

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

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

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.

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

So ... I feel in regard to this aged England ... pressed upon by transitions of trade and ... competing populations,I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.

The world belongs to the energetic.

He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments is the rich and royal man.

Every man is eloquent once in his life.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

One of our statesmen said, 'The curse of this country is eloquent men.'

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

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.

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

When I go into my 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 h

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has not superfluous parts; which exactly answers its ends.

We are much better believers in immortality than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions.

Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.

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.

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.

Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, But for a friend is life too short.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

A good intention clothes itself with power.

A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.

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.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.

The first wealth is health.

The first lesson of history, is, that evil is good.

The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

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

The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.

Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly beggar.

Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.

Self-truth is the essence of heroism.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

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.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud, you have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a know- ledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

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.

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

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion-it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to Be understood.

Life is a progress and not a station.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of Being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

Love is the essence of God.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear.

Love of beauty is taste.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? - No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

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

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Language is a city to the building of which every human Being brought a stone.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.

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

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession.

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

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

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

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; All others run into this one.

Money often costs too much.

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Character - a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort...

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.

Culture implies all that which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer.

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

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

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

Every man's task is his life-preserver.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, And to serve them one's self?

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

Books are the best things, well used: Abused, among the worst.

The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Character is that which can do without success.

Foxes are so cunning Because they are not strong.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, nor a mark of haste, or botching, or a second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

Here is a day now before me; A day is a fortune and an estate; who loses a day loses life.

He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, And lives with God.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than Any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.

Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Go often to the house of thy friend, weeds choke the unused path.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man Accompanies it.

For the world was built in order And the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.

For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.

Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the eldest inhabitant.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

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

God enters a private door into every individual.

They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, or state, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to Beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.

There is always safety in valor.

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.

There is nothing so dreadful as a great victory - except a great defeat.

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

The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home... Traveling is a fool's paradise.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter...It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind Acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important Benefit.

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, And not down; aspires and not despairs.

Thought...quickly tends to convert itself into a power, And organizes a huge instrumentality of means.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

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

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it.

Prudence is the virtue of the sense. It is the science of Appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

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

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

All diseases run into one, old age.

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

All mankind love a lover.

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

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

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