"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence."

"Every burned book enlightens the world."

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

"In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

"Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover."

"Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery."

"A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams."

"A day is a miniature eternity."

"And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship."

"If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare."

"The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides."

"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world."

"All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology."

"Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage."

"People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never."

"In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed."

"The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work."

"The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye."

"We are wiser than we know."

"America is another name for opportunity."

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this."

"All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man."

"Every word was once a poem."

"When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet."

"Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged from the beginning of the world that such as are in the institution wish to get out and such as are out wish to get in."

"Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well."

"Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods."

"It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself."

"Five great enemies to peace inhabit us: avarice ambition envy anger and pride. If those enemies were to be banished we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace."

"Cause and effect are two sides of one fact."

"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance arms us with terrible freedom so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge yet not the details but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful manly part or a poor drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions they have a substantial truth."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"All mankind love a lover."

"We gain the strength of the temptation we resist."

"We are reformers in spring and summer in autumn and winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night. Reform is affirmative conservatism negative conservatism goes for comfort reform for truth."

"There is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are."

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

"Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view."

"Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well."

"The years teach much which the days never know."

"This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it."

"Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactor."

"Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity."

"The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings."

"As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies."

"For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?"

"Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?"