I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.
What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!
Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.
Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.
Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.
Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, – chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.
I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
A man’s real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.
There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world’s ills will be cured.
I regarded our progress merely as an invitation to do more – as an indication that we had reached a place where we might begin to perform a real service.
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated.
All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.
Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.