If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.
Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread and meat.
Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.
In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.
A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine men.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.
Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.
Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.
In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature’s part.
Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.