All great men come out of the middle classes.
Never utter the truism but live it among men.
I like man, but not men.
Men are better than this theology.
America is a country of young men.
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.
Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, – a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.
The poise of a plant, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every vegetable and animal, are also demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. All history from its highest to its trivial passages is the various record of this power.
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.
In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.