Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.
Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit.
We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
Character is an invincible force, which acts by presence and without means.
He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation – this to to have succeeded.
Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.
A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Let us be poised, wise and our own today.
We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind – yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.
The laws of light and of heat translate each other;-so do the laws of sound and colour; and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.
Coal is a portable climate.
The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatched, but traits of character and sagacity, skill, or passion.
It is defeat which educates us.
Necessity does everything well.
Civilization depends on morality.