Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
What’s a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
Do what we can, summer will have its flies.
All my hurts my garden spade can heal.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
In the woods we return to reason and faith.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
There is nothing capricious in nature, and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.
Knowledge is the only elegance.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
Shallow men believe in luck.
Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.
Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.