Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

When it is dark enough, men see the stars.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

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.

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

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

The earth laughs in flowers.

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

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

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

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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.

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

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

This is my wish for you: Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth, Love to complete your life.

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.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

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

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

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

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

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

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Beauty without expression is boring.

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

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Love, and you shall be loved.

The years teach much which the days never know.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

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

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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

Immitation is suicide.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.

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.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

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

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

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...

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

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

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

We boil at different degrees.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

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

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men—that is genius.

The world belongs to the energetic.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

The first wealth is health.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Money often costs too much.

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

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

We are the prisoners of ideas.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

A man is known by the books he reads.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

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

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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

The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other.

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

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

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

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

Patience and fortitude conquer all things.

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares

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

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

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

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.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart....

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.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.

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

A man in debt is so far a slave.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Nature hates calculators.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

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

Self trust is the essence of heroism.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

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

For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Truth is beautiful within and without, forevermore.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.

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

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.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Character is that which can do without success.

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

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.

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

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

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

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

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

We change whether we like it or not.

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins

When there is no vision, people perish.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

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

Skill to do comes of doing.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of have was never large enough to cover.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

A good intention clothes itself with power.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

All mankind love a lover.

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

The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

A man is a god in ruins.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine

It is better to be a thorn in the side of a friend than an echo.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Art is a jealous mistress.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Of cheerfulness, or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

Reality is a sliding door.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

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

There is properly no history, only biography.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

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

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.

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.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

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

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

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

Sorrow makes us all children again.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

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

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

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.

A friend is the hope of the heart.

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

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness.

When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

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

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

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

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.

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

Self-command is the main elegance.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

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

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

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

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

The less government we have the better.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

To believe in luck ... is skepticism.

The only prudence in life is concentration.

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

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

The only true gifts are a portion of yourself.

The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

What is success? To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people And the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics And endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by A healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed Easier because you have lived; This is to have succeeded

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

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?

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

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

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived

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