People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Revolutions go not backward.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
There is always safety in valor.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Every wall is a door.
The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.
There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
Power and speed be hands and feet.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
What you are comes to you.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
