Quote collection
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"The enthusiast always finds the master, the masters, whom he seeks. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself."
"The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, - that we find we have (a common Nature) - one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine."
"It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun [Texas], and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done."
"Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes."
"I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals."
"The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God."
"In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt."
"If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house."
"The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life."
"Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household."
"Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past."
"But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile."
"We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end; but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures."
"You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism."
"I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they darenot trust their presentiments."
"No institution will be better than the institutor."
"But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends."
"As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form."
"The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over."
"Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt."