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

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.

Love, and you shall be loved.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs,...

Ein Freund ist ein Mensch, vor dem man laut denken kann.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must perceive appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I...

Good bye, proud world! I’m going home; Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Everybody keeps telling me how surprised they are with what I’ve done. But I’m telling you honestly that it doesn’t surprise me. I knew I could do it.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement, a selecting principle, gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.