Quote collection
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"Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men."
"Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine,--none of your sunshine!--but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,--which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it."
"I make myself rich by making my wants few."
"The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment."
"A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."
"A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn't give me companionship in return."
"Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel."
"If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished."
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be grounds enough for friendship."
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had the genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked for charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander."
"We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven."
"In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs."
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."
"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself."
"Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant."
"A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book."
"What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!"
"What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?"
"Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!"
"My profession is to always find God in nature."