When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?
Your richest veins don’t lie nearest the surface.
The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them; they are their true clothes.
Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He’ll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.
Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.
I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.
As they say in geology, time never fails, there is always enough of it, so I may say, criticism never fails.
The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.
Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.
Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.
Do not entertain doubts if they are not agreeable to you.
If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.
The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.
The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!
The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.
Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.