Striving is perhaps the one and only true elixir, for while we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

You become what you think about all day long.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having...

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise...

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough;...

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and...

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty

Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and...

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

The French woman says, ‘I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human’.

We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

The years teach us much the days never knew.

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can

Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire

Our strength grows out of our weaknesses

Pride ruined the angels.

A man is a little thing while he works by and for himself; but when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, he is godlike

I can find my biography in every fable that I read

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

A good intention clothes itself with power

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intellingent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty;...

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

A man cannot speak but he judges himself

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay,

The people are to be taken in very small doses

The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope...

The First wealth is health.