Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.
I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.
How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one
We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.
The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
The river knows the way to the sea: Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity.
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.
A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.
The French woman says, 'I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human.'
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.
It really is considered one of the blessings of previous mates which you could manage being silly with them.
Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.
Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.
Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores; And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.
Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.
I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides.
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.
To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.
The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.
What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.