"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man."

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

"The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs."

"Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain."

"Fear always springs from ignorance."

"The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person."

"A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women."

"He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry."

"Difficulties exist to be surmounted."

"A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles."

"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."

"For every benefit you receive a tax is levied."

"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it he must serve it too."

"Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant."

"The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself."

"Miss Austen's novels - seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer - is marriageableness."

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

"Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none."

"Money often costs too much."

"I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from."

"New York is a sucked orange."

"Fame is proof that people are gullible."

"No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous."

"To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"Books are for nothing but to inspire."

"The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses."

"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship."

"The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own."

"Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands."

"The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative."

"The soul contains the event that shall befall it for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted."

"People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

"The never-ending task of self improvement."

"America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres."

"A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for ten minutes longer."

"The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring they carry them as silently away."

"A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss."

"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers."

"There is a tendency for things to right themselves."

"The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers."

"Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give."

"We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."

"Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint."

"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."

"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul."

"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."

"The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat men to whom a crises which intimidates and paralyzes the majority comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!"