No institution will be better than the institutor.
I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they darenot trust their presentiments.
You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.
We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end; but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.
But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.
The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations.
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.
How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.
A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.
Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.
Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.
The vulgar call good fortune that which really is produced by the calculations of genius.
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!
Conversation is an evanescent relation, – no more.
He only is rich who owns the day.