Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.
The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.
A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.
I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking.
Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.
The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
My garden is a forest ledge Which older forest s bound; The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, Then plunge to depths profound!
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.
The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless. I want to devote my limited life to serving the people limitlessly.
These times of ours are series and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.
The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.
He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.
The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyoneÂ… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.
The exercise of all the senses is as intense pleasure, as anyone will find, who recovers the use of one after being deprived of it.
Go out of the house to see the moon, and't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
He who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter.
Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues.
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.
We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.
Our chief want in life, is, someone who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.
Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tiedoes not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.