A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his, – his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, – fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Treat your friend as a spectacle.
In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men.
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.
I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself.
I may say it of our preposterous use of books, – He knew not what to do, and so he read.
It is with a good book as it is with good company.
One must be an inventor to read well.
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.
The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.
Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.
Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.
In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.
The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.
Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it might deify both.
I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, – and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.