"The faith that stands on authority is not faith."

"Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence."

"Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest."

"Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events."

"Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he."

"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."

"The only reward of virtue is virtue, the only way to have a friend is to be one."

"Excite the soul and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear the world itself loses its solidity nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives."

"In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth."

"Imitation is suicide."

"My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine."

"Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices."

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

"To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light."

"I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals."

"Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities."

"The life of truth is cold."

"If I cannot brag of knowing something then I brag of not knowing it at any rate brag."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep."

"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."

"Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?"

"If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground."

"Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?"

"The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye."

"My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine."

"We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities."

"I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances."

"The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."

"To be great is to be misunderstood."

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. -It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time."

"It is time to be old To take in sail."

"A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word."

"There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream."

"I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son."

"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great."

"The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild."

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance."

"In nature nothing can be given all things are sold."

"When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know."

"We do not live an equal life but one of contrasts and patchwork now a little joy then a sorrow now a sin then a generous or brave action."

"Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich."

"A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors for the expression of all his history and his wants."

"Our best thoughts come from others."

"Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries the connection of events."

"Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret."

"Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France."

"I can find my biography in every fable that I read."

"As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way."

"Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it."