Hitch your wagon to a star.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

The finished man of the world must eat every apple once.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone

Beauty rests on necessities.

He built better than he knew; – / The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense of mind.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

New arts destroy the old.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of...

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby...

Never read any book that is not a year old.

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Every word was once a poem.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man...

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law...

God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please–you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect]

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

Our distrust is very expensive.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays

Genius Borrows nobly.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.