Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

Fame is proof that people are gullible

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of...

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Thoughts are the seed of action.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth

They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear.

Treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

A little integrity is better than any career

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

What I must do is all that concerns me. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder because you will always...

If you can do a thing once, you can do it twice. If you can do it twice, you can make a habit out of it

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence

An empire is an immense egotism

The highest virtue is always against the law.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.

There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery...

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You...

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the...

Books are for nothing but to inspire

We are wiser than we know.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it...

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his...

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate...

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame...

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Two man talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use

There is always safety in valor.

A fly is as untamable as a hyena.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument

A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

The less government we have the better.

What’s a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.