"The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith."

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

"Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo."

"Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day."

"Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty."

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

"The louder he talked of his honour the faster we counted our spoons."

"There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it."

"We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates."

"A believer a mind whose faith is consciousness is never disturbed because other persons do not yet see the fact which he sees."

"Beauty without expression is boring."

"Skill to do comes of doing."

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen."

"Shall we judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the minority surely."

"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit."

"When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation."

"When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying."

"Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry she carries them."

"Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year."

"None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world."

"Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society."

"To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine."

"That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence."

"I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons."

"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings."

"Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness."

"Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today."

"Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire."

"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."

"Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances a hundred things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!"

"We take care of our health we lay up money we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all-friends."

"People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know."

"Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradict everything you said today."

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. As to methods there may be a million and then some but the principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods ignoring principles is sure to have trouble."

"In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise."

"The earth laughs in flowers."

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind."

"The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education but the means of education."

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."

"Things refuse to be mismanaged for long."

"Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free."

"I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes."

"A man only knows what he's experienced."

"The only gift is a portion of thyself."

"Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake."

"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."

"There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount."

"The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is."

"Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive."

"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth."