You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.
Let nothing come between you and the light.
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker’s lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.
The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.
I stand in awe of my body.
We are ever dying to one world and being born into another.
We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
It’s not enough to be busy.
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man’s art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.
I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
Instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
When we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
There is no beginning too small.