Quote collection
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act."
"We don't grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old."
"Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well."
"Love, and you shall be loved."
"I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot."
"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions."
"Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much."
"Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old."
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
"He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter."
"I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom."
"The first wealth is health."
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
"The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us."
"Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."
"Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window."
"Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends."
"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."
"Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen."
"The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder."