Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature…. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

This is the history of governments, – one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part...

One idea lights a thousand candles.

We all live amid surfaces, and the true art is to skate well on them.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that...

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are...

Men are what their mothers made them

Concentration is the secret of strength

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui, vanish, – all duties even

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

I hate quotations.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything to others but what you are

Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a...

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

Immortality will come to such as are fit for it; and he who would be a great soul in the future must be a great soul now

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men–that is genius.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which...

To fill the hour──that is happiness.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words,...

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he...

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have...

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

The future belongs to those who prepare for it.

Earth laughs in flowers.

Character – a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know