The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.
We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.
Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf.
Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration.
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a stone; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
A good intention but fixed and resolute – bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us “like the fabled specter-ships,” which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
Go out of the house to see the moon, and’t is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky, leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
What we call results are beginnings.
Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.
There are men too superior to be seen except by a few, as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.
Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.