Quote collection
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"A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue."
"Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!"
"The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien."
"The vulgar call good fortune that which really is produced by the calculations of genius."
"Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort."
"Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath."
"The world globes itself in a drop of dew."
"How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise."
"There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determinefor the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege."
"An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer."
"All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature."
"If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed."
"All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength."
"The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done."
"Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves."
"A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands."
"Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away."
"A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs."
"Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers"
"Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less."