Grow angry slowly – there’s plenty of time.
The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are.
It all begins when the soul would have its way with you.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.
Law of Contrariness: Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; – The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew’st be souls.
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man’s ear seldom in this low life’s round are unsealed, that he may hear.
The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey.
The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.
The man for whom the law exists – the man of forms, the conservative – is a tame man.
Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.
But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.
Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.