To fill the hour — that is happiness.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few...

These days come and go, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Never read any book that is not a year old

No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love

Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.

Truth is our element.

In nature nothing can be given, all things are sold

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire...

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?…The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover

Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All

Cut a word and it will bleed.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong...

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

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

As many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come...

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.

Imitation is suicide.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out...

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding...

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of...

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world

Women should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores; she does all by inspiring men to do all

There was never a poet who had not the heart in the right place

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.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

To think is to act.

Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.