There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.
It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.
No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.
Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said.
Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.
You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.
If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.
The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.
I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.
The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.
It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.
A beautiful woman is a practical poet.
A woman’s strength is the unresistible might of weakness.
War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men’s brains instead of their bowels.
The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.
A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.
In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.