We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they...

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that...

The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall...

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank...

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Children are all foreigners.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has...

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing /to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline...

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education

For everything you have missed you have gained something

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance

Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to...

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Do your work, but do your thing.

A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists–talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He...

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will...

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

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and...

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of...

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.