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.

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...

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

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

The world is his who has money to go over it.

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

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

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

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

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

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...

A man is known by the books he reads.

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

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

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

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

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

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

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions

It is the ignorant and childish part of man that is the fighting part

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of...

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

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...

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...

Beauty without expression is boring.

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

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

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.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

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

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he...

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

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

What you are comes to you

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Art is a jealous mistress.