Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
But the golden-rod is one of the fairy, magical flowers; it grows not up to seek human love amid the light of day, but to mark to the discerning what wealth lies hid in the secret caves of earth.
I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors.
Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.
In order that she may be able to give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.
It seems that it is madder never to abandon one’s self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.
Be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.
Artists are always young.
I find no intellect comparable to my own.
How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little.
All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.
Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit – doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.
Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.
But her eye, that torch or the soul, is untamed, and in the intensity of her reading, we see a soul invincibly young in faith and hope.
But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.
We have waited here long in the dust; we are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.
Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow.