Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer.
A man’s religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.
The eye of the intellect “sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.”
The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out therefrom, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.
To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.
Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.
The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.
They only are wise who know that they know nothing.
The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.
To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.