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.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Here once the embattled farmers stood, / And fired the shot heard round the world.

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

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

He serves all who dares be true.

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...

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely, but by watching for a time...

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...

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

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

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth

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.

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

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

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

Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair;The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy...

Scatter joy!

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, “The Gods...

Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

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

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

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies

If the stars should appear just one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!

Difficulties exist to be surmounted