Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
All human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads till all is luminous.
Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.
The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.
We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.
A poor creature who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.
If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself.
The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.
If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.
The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.
Wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses which he is loved and blessed by.
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
"Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith."
At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?
There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.
Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.
The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Success in life, in anything, depends upon the number of persons that one can make himself agreeable to.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.
Men worship the shows of great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.
In private life I never knew anyone interfere with other people's disputes but he heartily repented of it.
It is not a lucky word, this name impossible; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
A heavenly awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought, and must, all earthly business whatsoever.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
There are female dandies as well as clothes-wearing men; and the former are as objectionable as the latter.
Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?
Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowledge is quiet; not so the transition from the former to the latter.
Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.