Books are for nothing but to inspire.

This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life Depends upon one’s actions.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations

The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in...

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… ”Beware of me,” it says, ”but if you can hold me, I am the key...

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs...

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation’s time.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it–else it is none.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of...

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored...

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth...

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well – he has changed...

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal...

The world we live in is but thickened light.

There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all: And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everywhere

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue.

It is a luxury to be understood.

That man is idle who can do something better

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if has a headache.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men,...

Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen...

Only so much do I know, as I have lived

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.