We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.
Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.
When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.
Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last, – a long way leading nowhere.
All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.
War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.
Body cannot teach wisdom; God only.
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.
Wisdom is infused into every form.
Of all wit’s uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.
The finest wits have their sediment.
True wit never made us laugh.
That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.
Women see through Claude Lorraines.
It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.
Youth is everywhere in place.
We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.