What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?
Birds never sing in caves.
Men are probably nearer the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.
It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.
Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.
I have a deep sympathy with war; it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.
Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them – that it was a vain endeavor?
I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory.
I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.
He listens equally to the prayers of the believer and the unbeliever.
Man emulates earth Earth emulates heaven Heaven emulates the Way The way emulates nature.
Everything counts for gain when we are cosmically awake. Nothing counts, unless we are awake. No enjoyments last, no successes satisfy, no gains have meaning unless accomplished in a state of wakefulness.
I did not know that we had ever quarreled.
No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.
The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.