The force of character is cumulative

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly in to the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today

There are two classes of poets – the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let...

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity

Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a...

Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much

Do what you are afraid to do

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

Obedience alone gives the right to command

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days

Necessity does everything well.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.”

The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in...

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, –/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you...

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves...

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and...

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of...

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

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 spirit that ever took flesh. To be...

Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched...

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Live, let live, and help live

I see my trees repair their boughs

There can be no high civility without a deep morality

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Love, and you shall be loved

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can’t make him let go

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.