Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience...

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

Cunning is strength withheld.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,―expensive races,―race living at the expense of race.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us...

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...

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

A friend may be nature’s most magnificent creation.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors...

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.

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

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

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

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

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.

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

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

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

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

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

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

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

Wherever there is power there is age.

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

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

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship,like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

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. Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,...

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.

An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel

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

We change, whether we like it or not

Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.

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

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise

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,...

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

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

Whoso would be a man would be a nonconformist

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task ofmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it...

You become what you think about all day long.

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

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...

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul