Truth is always paradoxical.
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.
Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.
Still we live meanly like ants, though the fable tells us we were long ago changed into men.
We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
Morality is how you go about getting what you want without screwing anybody to get it.
As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.
Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.
The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.
The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.
But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. Now he falls between two stools.
What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.
Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.
What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues.
It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.