Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Nature hates calculators.
We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.
Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.
To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person’s point of view.