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.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.
Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.
The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe.
The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk but after the counsel of his own bosom.
I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.