Ralph Waldo Emerson
philosopher, poet, writer, essayist, diarist, biographer, Unitarian pastor, Christian minister, orator, abolitionist
Read on Wikipedia1803 – 1882
All Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
“It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.”
“Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.”
“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.”
“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
“We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“God enters by a private door into every individual.”
“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
“Whatever limits us we call Fate.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
“Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.”
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
“The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”
“That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.”
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.”
“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
“Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.”
“As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.”
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
“Coal is a portable climate.”
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
“The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
“The world is his, who has money to go over it.”
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
“Art is a jealous mistress.”
“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”
“If a man own land, the land owns him.”
“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
“You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
“The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”
“Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.”
“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”
“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
“The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.”
“The first wealth is health.”
“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”
“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.”
“The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.”
“We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.”
“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”
“Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”
“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”
“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”
“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
“We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
“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. 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.”
“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
“Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.”
“The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
“The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know the truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.”
“Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.”
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
“Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.”
“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”
“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
“All mankind love a lover.”
“If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.”
“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
“The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.”
“Our chief want in life, is somebody who shall make us do what we can.”
“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.”
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.”
“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.”
“The cup of life is not so shallow And lees make all the rest.”
“The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore".”
“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”
“'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.”
“I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”
“The life of truth is cold.”
“The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.”
“There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.”
“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
“I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.”
“Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.”
“The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.”
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
“None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.”
“God said, I am tired of kings, The outrage of the poor.”
“The years teach much the days never know.”
“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”
“To-day unbind the captive, Trump of their rescue, sound!”
“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.”
“O tenderly the haughty day And one in our desire.”
“Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.”
“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. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”
“United States! the ages plead, — Nor speak with double tongue.”
“The first wealth is health.”
“The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.”
“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”
“I think no virtue goes with size; To the titmouse dimension.”
“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, The youth replies, I can.”
“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.”
“England’s genius filled all measure Poets, for the air was fame.”
“The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made … Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities … Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.”
“Nor mourn the unalterable Days That Genius goes and Folly stays.”
“Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”
“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”
“Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.”
“Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”
“The South-wind brings”
“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”
“The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.”
“He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.”
“Language is fossil Poetry.”
“Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.”
“Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.”
“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.”
“Deep in the man sits fast his fate To mould his fortunes, mean or great.”
“Beauty without expression is boring.”
“Nothing can be preserved that is not good.”
“For the prevision is allied Is the same Genius that creates.”
“Never read any book that is not a year old.”
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.”
“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”
“If the colleges were better, if they … had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, — if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.”
“It is time to be old, And said: 'No more!”
“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”
“Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.”
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”
“Though love repine, and reason chafe, When for the truth he ought to die."”
“The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”
“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”
“For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?”
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
“There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.”
“If the red slayer think he slays, I keep, and pass, and turn again.”
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
“The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”
“Far or forgot to me is near; And one to me are shame and fame.”
“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
“He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.”
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
“I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.”
“They reckon ill who leave me out; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.”
“Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.”
“In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.”
“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
“The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.”
“Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.”
“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.”
“Every man is a new method.”
“The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.”
“Some of your hurts you have cured, From evils which never arrived!”
“Every man I meet is in some way my superior; and in that I can learn of him.”
“A ruddy drop of manly blood The lover rooted stays.”
“You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'”
“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”
“I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
“The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.”
“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”
“I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible”
“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”
“What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?”
“The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”
“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.”
“We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
“The horseman serves the horse, And ride mankind.”
“Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
“Money often costs too much.”
“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
“When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.”
“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. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”
“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.”
“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”
“Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”
“'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.”
“To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.”
“Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.”
“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
“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.”
“We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.”
“The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.”
“There is no knowledge that is not power.”
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
“The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.”
“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
“Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.”
“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.”
“Pictures must not be too picturesque.”
“We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”
“Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.”
“Children are all foreigners.”
“A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.”
“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.”
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
“Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.”
“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”
“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”
“Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.”
“He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.”
“Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.”
“If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.”
“Music is the poor man's Parnassus.”
“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
“It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.”
“The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.”
“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.”
“You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.”
“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".”
“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”
“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”
“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.”
“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.”
“This world belongs to the energetic.”
“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”
“Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.”
“The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.”
“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
“Every word was once a poem.”
“Blessed are those who have no talent!”
“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.”
“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”
“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”
“I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”
“A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.”
“The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.”
“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.”
“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”
“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
“The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.”
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”
“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
“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.”
“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”
“God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please--you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect]”
“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
“Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.”
“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
“A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.”
“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”
“The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be the heroic.”
“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”
“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
“The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price.”
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”
“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”
“We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.”
“The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.”
“A man is a god in ruins.”
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.”
“Atom from atom yawns as far”
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.”
“Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life".”
“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”
“The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.”
“We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.”
“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”
“But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”
“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”
“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
“Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.”
“To live without duties is obscene.”
“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”
“There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.”
“When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.”
“Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.”
“Nor knowest thou what argument Nothing is fair or good alone.”
“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”
“Life is our dictionary.”
“I wiped away the weeds and foam, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”
“Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.”
“Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys Clear of the grave.”
“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
“Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.”
“Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.”
“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”
“The soul is subject to dollars.”
“For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?”
“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”
“If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”
“Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams”
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
“The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.”
“Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.”
“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”
“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”
“Olympian bards who sung And always keep us so.”
“Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”
“Heartily know, The gods arrive.”
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
“Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”
“Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.”
“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”
“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”
“The silent organ loudest chants The master's requiem.”
“Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.”
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”
“Love what is simple and beautiful.”
“Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.”
“And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.”
“What potent blood hath modest May!”
“We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”
“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”
“And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.”
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
“Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.”
“And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.”
“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.”
“Genius always finds itself a century too early.”
“It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — "Always do what you are afraid to do."”
“None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have.”
“All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.”
“Oh, tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire.”
“Do what we can, summer will have its flies: if we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitos: if we go a-fishing, we must expect a wet coat.”
“Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.”
“Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.”
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, The youth replies, I can!”
“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.”
“Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore.”
“History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.”
“Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.”
“There is properly no history; only biography.”
“Born for success he seemed, With shining gifts that took all eyes.”
“No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.”
“Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.”
“Nor mourn the unalterable Days That Genius goes and Folly stays.”
“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”
“Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.”
“Fear not, then, thou child infirm; There's no god dare wrong a worm.”
“It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.”
“He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.”
“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”
“Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!”
“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
“All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.”
“Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.”
“When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.”
“Though love repine, and reason chafe, When for the truth he ought to die."”
“Pictures must not be too picturesque.”
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is.”
“For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?”
“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
“If the red slayer think he slays, I keep and pass and turn again.”
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
“Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.”
“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.”
“Oh, what have I to do with time?”
“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 though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
“Seeing only what is fair, Thou dost mock at fate and care.”
“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”
“Thou animated torrid-zone.”
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.”
“In the vaunted works of Art The master-stroke is Nature's part. 5.”
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
“If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6.”
“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.”
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”
“The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.”
“Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. 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 and the insane 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 a spectacle.”
“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”
“In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”
“The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.”
“You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.”
“The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.”
“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”
“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
“Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.”
“Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
“But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”
“Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.”
“Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.”
“It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?”
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
“Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.”
“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”
“You become what you think about all day long.”
“Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.”
“Never read any book that is not a year old.”
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
“In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
“We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.”
“The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.”
“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”
“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.”
“The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.”
“Thou art to me a delicious torment.”
“The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.”
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.”
“Happy is the house that shelters a friend!”
“Shallow men believe in luck.”
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.”
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”
“Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.”
“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”
“The faith that stands on authority is not faith.”
“A great man is always willing to be little.”
“Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”
“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
“The faith that stands on authority is not faith.”
“Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.”
“God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.”
“But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.”
“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.”
“Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?”
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
“Money often costs too much.”
“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”
“Self-trust is the first secret of success.”
“In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.”
“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”
“Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.”
“When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."”
“Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”
“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
“I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.”
“Good men must not obey the laws too well.”
“Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.”
“There is no great and no small And it cometh everywhere.”
“America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.”
“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.”
“The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.”
“Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.”
“One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.”
“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.”
“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
“All mankind love a lover.”
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
“A ruddy drop of manly blood The lover rooted stays.”
“Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop”
“Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.”
“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.”
“Thou art to me a delicious torment.”
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.”
“The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.”
“Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
“And with Cæsar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these will I relinquish if you will show me the fountain of the Nile."”
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”
“We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”
“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”
“Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.”
“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.”
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
“The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.”
“To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
“We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.”
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.”
“We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
“A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.”
“as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.”
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.”
“The years teach much which the days never know.”
“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”
“Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?”
“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?”
“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.”
“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”
“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”
“Our best thoughts come from others.”
“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.”
“Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.”
“Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.”
“A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.”
“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”
“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?”
“When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”
“The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.”
“Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying”
“We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.”
“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”
“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
“I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me.”
“Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.”
“I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: "This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats."”
“It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single all-knowing master.”
“The South-wind brings”
“Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.”
“All diseases run into one, old age.”
“Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills.”
“We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.”
“The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.”
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
“Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.”
“This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way.”
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
“We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, — only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.”
“Each the herald is who wrote That can fix a hero's rate.”
“I saw men go up and down, 'What am I? companion, say.'”
“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
“This time, like all times, is a very good time - if we but know what to do with it”
“Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home: Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.”
“Time like space, is part of the permanent context of life. Time does not pass, we pass.”
“For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?”
“Nor knowest thou what argument Nothing is fair or good alone.”
“Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”
“I wiped away the weeds and foam, With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.”
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.”
“A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world The frolic architecture of the snow.”
“Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.”
“Life is too short to waste God speed the mark!”
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.”
“For there's no rood has not a star above it; And for the whole.”
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
“A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.”
“But all sorts of things and weather And a sphere.”
“A man is what he thinks about all day long.”
“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
“Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; Neither can you crack a nut.”
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.”
“Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“Whoso walketh in solitude, From these companions power and grace.”
“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
“We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”
“For nature beats in perfect tune, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.”
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
“There are two laws discrete Law for man, and law for thing.”
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
“Olympian bards who sung And always keep us so.”
“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
“Give all to love; Nothing refuse.”
“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”
“Though thou loved her as thyself, The gods arrive.”
“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
“Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
“But these young scholars who invade our hills, And all their botany is Latin names.”
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”
“Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.”
“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.”
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
“Pass in, pass in, the angels say, By the stairway of surprise.”
“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
“I like a church, I like a cowl, Which I could not on me endure?”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
“The reward of a thing well done is having done it.”
“Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.”
“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”
“It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
“A day is a miniature eternity.”
“Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.”
“Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.”
“The hand that rounded Peter's dome, The conscious stone to beauty grew.”
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.”
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
“Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.”
“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.”
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.”
“The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.”
“All mankind love a lover.”
“He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.”
“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”
“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 is always willing to be little.”
“A good indignation brings out all one's powers.”
“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
“It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.”
“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.”
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.”
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
“Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?”
“Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.”
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
“The reward of a thing well done is having done it.”
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
“Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.”
“Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.”
“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.”
“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?”
“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
“Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”
“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
“Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.”
“Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.”
“As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”
“In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.”
“Me too thy nobleness has taught”
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“How can he [today’s writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.”
“In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.”