Quote collection
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"He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."
"Life is a search after power."
"Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good."
"It is very hard to be simple enough to be good."
"Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its oracles."
"Sometimes we receive the power to say yes to life. Then peace enters us and makes us whole."
"We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament"
"The highest Beauty should be plain set."
"I honor health as the first Muse."
"Great men exist that there might be greater men."
"Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge."
"All the devils respect virtue."
"It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist"
"A man cannot speak but he judges himself"
"When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds."
"Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself."
"When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,-no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time."
"If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much."
"To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story."
"I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action."