The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as...

The religions we call false were once true

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do, and let be, who...

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

A man is a God in ruins.

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

The ancestor of every action is thought.

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair;The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy...

Scatter joy!

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, “The Gods...

Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies

If the stars should appear just one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!

Difficulties exist to be surmounted

The virtue in most request is conformity.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Here once the embattled farmers stood, / And fired the shot heard round the world.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

He serves all who dares be true.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and...

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely, but by watching for a time...

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be...

The artist must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.