The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

The ancestor of every action is a thought

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow

No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for...

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when...

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of...

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

We have more than we use.

Heroism feels and never reasons and is therefore always right.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

Between eighteen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Skepticism is slow suicide

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all

The only true gift is a portion of yourself.

No dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he infallibly falls into the Establishment

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have...

The fundaments of a person are not in substance, but in spirits.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto...

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may...

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is...

Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and...

Be an opener of doors

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to...

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

One definition of man is ”an intelligence served by organs.”

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

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