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

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise...

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough;...

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And...

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

Imagination is not the talent of some men, but is the health of every man

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without...

Real action is in silent moments.

The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste