Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.
The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.
An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.
Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life. People only see what they are prepared to see.
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.
Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.
There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.
I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
That which distinguishes this day from all others is that then both orators and artillerymen shoot blank cartridges.
Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.
Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.
There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride.
I would like to see every newspaper and every magazine have a network of bureaus all over the world, gathering news.
Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.
We travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
There's so much visible stuff around now, we're tempted to forget that it's usually the invisible that matters most.
You rebel against your parents until you become them. One day you look in the mirror and you see your father's face.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.
Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.
Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made And people whose skin is a different shade.
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.
Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.
An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.