"Truth is the summit of being, justice is the application of it to affairs."

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals."

"That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened."

"The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics."

"To Be is to live with God."

"Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know."

"With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradicts everything you said today."

"I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil."

"That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased."

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now."

"True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."

"He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard."

"A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before."

"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form."

"The dull pray, the geniuses are light mockers."

"Men are what their mothers made them."

"Over the inter glaciers,I see the summer glow,And, through the wild-piled snowdrift,The warm rosebuds below."

"Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude."

"Nature is saturated with deity."

"Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for."

"We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases."

"Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors and a misfit from the start."

"There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere."

"Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways."

"It is not the length of life, but the depth."

"Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside."

"Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?"

"We never touch but at points."

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

"Genius always finds itself a century too early."

"It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances."

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."

"Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail."

"Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about."

"We fancy men are individuals so are pumpkins but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history."

"The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting."

"Every hero becomes a bore at last."

"It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way."

"Every sweet hath its sour every evil its good."

"Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist."

"Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command."

"There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation."

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

"The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows..."

"Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense."

"Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."