Quote collection
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being."
"I think no virtue goes with size."
"I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth."
"I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition."
"The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion."
"A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic."
"I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world."
"So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe."
"To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone."
"The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government."
"There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do; not to work, but to be worked upon."
"Give me truths for I am weary of the surfaces."
"I have never met a man who was not my superior in some particular."
"You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made And people whose skin is a different shade."
"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts."
"The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea."
"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions."
"A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong . . . . Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment."
"For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose."
"Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God?"