Quote collection
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity."
"Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism."
"Wherever there is power there is age."
"Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!"
"Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself."
"The finest poetry was first experience."
"The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatched, but traits of character and sagacity, skill, or passion."
"Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life."
"The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter."
"The city is recruited from the country."
"The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy."
"What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason."
"Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie-for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance-will instantly vitiate the effect."
"New arts destroy the old."
"We are the prisoners of ideas."
"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west."
"He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand."
"There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race."
"To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism."
"You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own."