Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands.
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.
Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!
Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.
It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
If with love thy heart has burned; If thy love is unreturned; Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed.
We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.
It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.
Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
A believer, a mind whose faith is consciousness, is never disturbed because other persons do not yet see the fact which he sees.
[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.
When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.
Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.
Homeopathy is insignificant as an act of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.
Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear seldom in this low life's round are unsealed, that he may hear.
What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.
Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.
The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.
It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.
Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.
Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.
The primary wisdom is intuition. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their origin.
When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.
To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.
The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails.
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.