Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
We must be our own before we can be another’s.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, – by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.
The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Real action is in silent moments.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.
We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.