We begin to praise when we begin to see a thing needs our assistance.
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.
I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.
Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.
The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money?
Where there is a lull in truth an institution springs up.
It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden.
When I hear a grown man or woman say, “Once I had faith in men, now I have not,” I am inclined to ask, “Who are you whom the world has disappointed? Have not you rather disappointed the world?”
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.
I say, break the law.
In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.