It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman.
Women are safer in perilous situations and emergencies than men, and might be still more so if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of manhood.
Keep the imagination sane – that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow – the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.
Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand.
There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.
The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.
The divine chemistry works in the subsoil.
Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.
Ugliness without tact is horrible.
To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend, – this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts.
We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.
If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings.
Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms – a pistol – perhaps a revolver.
No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom.
A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.
What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?
This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.
I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.