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.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.

Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if unmixed

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

‘Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

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

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel

Things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Do what you know, and perception is converted into character, as islands and continents were built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorb light, electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to...

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Some of your hurts you have cured, / And the sharpest you still have survived, / But what torments of grief you endured / From evils which never arrived!

To live without duties is obscene.

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive

Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as...

The religions we call false were once true

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do, and let be, who...

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one