Things have their laws as well as men; things refuse to be trifled with.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

I awoke with devout thanksgiving for my friends.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

In creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenism in Christianity, the periodic “revivals,” the Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of

There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement

A man is related to all nature.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to...

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. –

You Life is a progress, and not a station.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Write it on your heartthat every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the daywho allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish...

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What...

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat,...

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only...

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change...

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible

The individual is always mistaken

The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light

Every advantage has its tax.

Our strength grows out of our weakness

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

A field cannot well be seen from within the field.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines...

Our best history is still poetry.

A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.