"Vigor is contagious and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action."

"Every artist was first an amateur."

"Pain indolence sterility endless ennui have also their lesson for you."

"Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life."

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body."

"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new."

"Power and speed be hands and feet."

"To be simple is to be great."

"What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me."

"Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great."

"Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

"Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying."

"If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being."

"I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live."

"Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass."

"The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough."

"It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much but I am my own comedy and tragedy."

"The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth."

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

"Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will."

"Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds."

"To fill the hour that is happiness to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval."

"Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart."

"We are always getting ready to live but never living."

"As a man thinketh so is he and as a man chooseth so is he."

"Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?"

"Never read a book that is not a year old."

"Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art."

"We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs."

"Always do what you are afraid to do."

"Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live."

"All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal."

"Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim."

"When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."

"It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem."

"No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character."

"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."

"The first wealth is health."

"I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it."

"Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended."

"Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated."

"Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up."

"You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel."

"There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world."

"Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance."

"The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

"Calmness is always Godlike."