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

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.

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 only what lies in its own focus.

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....

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.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it–else it is none.

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...

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

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

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet...

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

O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great...

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.

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

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

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

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

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes

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

Books are for nothing but to inspire.

This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life Depends upon one’s actions.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations

The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment

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

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

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

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

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

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

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries...

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… ”Beware of me,” it says, ”but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.”

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

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. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil...

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

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished

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.

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

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

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

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.

Do the thing and you will have the power.