The first point of courtesy must always be truth.
Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.
There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
A man is related to all nature.
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.
Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.
But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature.
A man of no conversation should smoke.