What you are comes to you

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Art is a jealous mistress.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet...

A man is known by the books he reads.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

It is dainty to be sick, if you have leisure and convenience for it

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions

It is the ignorant and childish part of man that is the fighting part

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of...

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

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,...

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.