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...

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.

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.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

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...

Quotation confesses inferiority.

Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

The ancestor of every action is a thought

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow

No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for...

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when...

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of...

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

We have more than we use.

Heroism feels and never reasons and is therefore always right.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

Between eighteen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Skepticism is slow suicide

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all

The only true gift is a portion of yourself.

No dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he infallibly falls into the Establishment

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have...

The fundaments of a person are not in substance, but in spirits.