Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
What is a farm but a mute gospel?
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.
Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.
Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.
The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'
Without electricity, the air would rot.
Life is our dictionary.
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.
Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.
As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.
Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
