The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.
Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
People seem sheathed in their tough organization.
It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, – no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, – these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?
There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
The modernness of all good books seems to give men an existence as wide as man.
The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.
For you, o broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.
Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.
A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.