A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can’t in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.
A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table.
If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.
A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.
There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.
The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.