Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.
Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.
All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made And people whose skin is a different shade.
And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.
Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.
For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.
An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.
In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.
I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
What care though rival cities soar Along the stormy coast, Penn's town, New York, Baltimore, If Boston knew the most!
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.
Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.
Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
A child convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. The reward for a thing well done, is to have done it.
The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.
Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
Insist on your life, never imitate... do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.