Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.
A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.
A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.
Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.
In its fifty-first year of publication, 'The Paris Review' continues to search for new ways to bring together writers and readers.
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.
Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!
Every man in the time of courtship and in the first entrance of marriage, puts on a behavior like my correspondent's holiday suit.
It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.
Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.
Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.
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.
A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.
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.
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.
The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
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.
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.
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 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.
Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.
I do strive to think well of my fellow man, but no amount of striving can give me confidence in the wisdom of a congressional vote.
The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.
Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.
All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.
Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings.
Loveliest of women! heaven is in thy soul, Beauty and virtue shine forever round thee, Bright'ning each other! thou art all divine!
When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.
Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.
Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.
I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.
There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
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.
The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.
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.
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
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.