Borrowed garments never keep one warm.
From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature’s text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.
Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.
It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book,-and that is a book honestly come by.
All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion ; and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.
Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.
A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.
Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.
Sorrow is the great idealizer.
There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
Take winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow; with no nonsense in him, which is a great comfort in the long-run.
It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.
Earth’s noblest thing,-a woman perfected.
Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary.
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.