There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
The gentleman is a man of truth.
A day is a miniature eternity.
Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.
Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide.
The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.
Never try to make anyone like you: you know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.
I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. mettle: spirited bottom: capacity to endure strain.
One of our statesmen said, “The curse of this country is eloquent men.”
What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in.
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity.
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.