Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Thoughts and Lines

''We know that madness belongs to love,—what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.''

''Fate then is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought;Mfor causes which are unpenetrated.''

''I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.''

''Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"''

''Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman,—repose in energy.''

''Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.''

''Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer.... He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.''

''If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.''

''The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.''

''Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.''

''There came into the house a young maiden, but she seemed to be more than a thousand years old. She came into the house naked and helpless, but she had for her defence more than the strength of millions. She brought into the day the manners of the Night.''

''The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow him. ''

''The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy,—more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.''

''I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.''

''We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.''

''The modernness of all good books seems to give men an existence as wide as man.''

''You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.''

''The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.''

''The universe is the bride of the soul.''

''I may say it of our preposterous use of books,—He knew not what to do, and so he read.''

''Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.''

''Master of all sorts of wood-craft, he seemed a part of the forest and the lake, and the secret of his amazing skill seemed to be that he partook of the nature and fierce instincts of the beasts he slew.''

''Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.''

''Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.''

''The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.''

''Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.''

''If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.''

''The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.''

''There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.''

''The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.''

''Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.''

''An empire is an immense egotism.''

''We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!''

''As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.''

''We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful.''

''Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.''

''It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.''

''Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul?''

''If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.''

''The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.''

''If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.''

''Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man's experience but our own.''

''A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.''

''We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.''

''Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.''

''Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.''

''We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.''

''The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it.... "Beware of me," it says, "but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands."''

''The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.''

''If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.''

''But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power. There should be a temperance in making cloth, as well as in eating.''

''If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.''

''We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense.''

''Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world.''

''If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.''

''I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?—or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?"''

''The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth.''

''Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.''

''The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it.''

''There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.''

''Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.''

''Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.''

''Talk of Columbus and Newton! I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs. But you must have the believing and prophetic eye.''

''We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.''

''No institution will be better than the institutor.''

''We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.''

''There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty.''

''The simplest words,—we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.''

''A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.''

''The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.''

''Men are what their mothers made them.''

''Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.''

''As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.''

''To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.''

''A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.''

''Life is our dictionary.''

''When he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes the watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage, when no place is too solitary, and none too silent.''

''Masses! the calamity is the masses.''

''As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.''

''Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.''

''The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.''

''As we are, so we do; and as we do, so it is done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.''

''Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.''

''You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.''

''I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work.''

''In the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.''

''No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. 'Tis a step out of the chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.''

''Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you.''

''What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.''

''The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.''

''The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.''

''An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.''

''In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.''

''There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.''

''One definition of man is "an intelligence served by organs."''

''It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.''

''But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.''

''For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.''

''What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.''

''Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,—than Romeo.''

''When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?''

''It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.''

''Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it.''

''We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.''

''Who can ... guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?''

''Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.''

''An old French sentence says, "God works in moments,"M"En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.''

''I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.''

''The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toy house.''

''I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.''

''On the most profitable lie, the course of events presently lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient footing, and makes their business a friendship.''

''We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.''

''Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions.''

''There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.''

''Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.''

''As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.''

''The soul circumscribes all things.''

''An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.''

''Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.''

''How dare I read Washington's campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.''

''Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.''

''Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may will call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.''

''The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity.''

''I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!''

''The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.''

''Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over- influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.''

''Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.''

''Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.''

''The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.''

''A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.''

''Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.''

''The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.''

''We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end; but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.''

''The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.''

''I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments.''

''I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.''

''The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.''

''The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.''

''The worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.''

''People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.''

''I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.''

''I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom.''

''Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope.''

''Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.''

''The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.''

''Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.''

''For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.''

''For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul.''

''The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart.''

''We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.''

''Convert life into truth.''

''Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.''

''Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands.''

''A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.''

''But all great men come out of the middle classes. 'Tis better for the head; 'tis better for the heart.''

''When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.''

''We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptions to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can be enumerated.''

''Insist on yourself; never imitate.''

''Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.''

''We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity.''

''The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions.''

''The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.''

''An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.''

''There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.''

''Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.''

''Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.''

''Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.''

''The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.''

''She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.''

''Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.''

''And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.''

''The greatest genius is the most indebted man.''

''Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.''

''I awoke this morning with a devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself to me in his gifts?''

''Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.''

''The world is all outside: it has no inside.''

''Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth.''

''A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.''

''There is properly no history, only biography.''

''But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?''

''The more difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they are used when they come.''

''Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.''

''But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.''

''The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations.''

''A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.''

''A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms.''

''Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.''

''Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.''

''Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.''

''Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.''

''This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men of endurance—deep-chested, long- winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely.''

''It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.''

''Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.''

''But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.''

''Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.''

''Religion must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep its wild beauty.''

''And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.''

''Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?''

''Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?''

''I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it.''

''The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.''

''We can never part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!''

''The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.''

''If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.''

''I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of religion, is one with that of the private life.''

''For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,—he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.''

''The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.''

''The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.''

''Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected.''

''Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.''

''But genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.''

''There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct.''

''Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.''

''Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.''

''It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also.''

''The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.''

''Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.''

''The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.''

''The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.''

''Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.''

''The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidate the pale scholar.''

''The frolic architecture of the snow.''

''We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.''

''Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.''

''The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.''

''Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.''

''There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.''

''When I have seen fine statues, and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, "When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants."''

''If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.''

''Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.''

''Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.''

''Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.''

''It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.''

''A garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of, every month, in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction.''

''If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!''

''All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?''

''Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.''

''Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.''

''The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.''

''Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.''

''The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.''

''He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times.''

''Things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.''

'''Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.''

''I may as well say, what all men feel, that whilst our every amiable and very innocent representatives and senators at Washington are accomplished lawyers and merchants, and every eloquent at dinners and at caucuses, there is a disastrous want of men in New England.''

''Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.''

''Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.''

''Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.''

''A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession.''

''Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?''

''Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.''

''Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.''

''Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.''

''The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.''

''In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.''

''The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.''

''The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.''

''Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.''

''The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstacy.''

''In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.''

''Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.''

''The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.''

''All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two- Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied.''

''Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.''

''Language is fossil poetry.''

''The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.''

''The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.''

''The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it might deify both.''

''They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all.''

''No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.''

''Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mail-bag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.''

''Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.''

''Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.''

''There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him.''

''The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.''

''A good deal of our politics is physiological.''

''We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.''

''The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.''

''Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable?''

''If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.''

''Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.''

''Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.''

''The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.''

''The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.''

''Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.''

''The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.''

''Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,—not only dust and stones, but errors and lies.''

''There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, "Anywhere but here."''

''Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.''

''Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.''

''But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.''

''The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.''

''I—this thought which is called I—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.''

''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.''

''I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.''

''Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.''

''Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.''

''For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.''

''Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.''

''Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.''

''The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.''

''A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.''

''The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.''

''We are sure that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.''

''In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.''

''Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upwards towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.''

''Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.''

''The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things.''

''The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.''

''Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.''

''Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,—is not that mine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.''

''Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.''

''Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear.''

''A squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,—is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature.''

''A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.''

''This Ennui, for which we Saxons had no name, this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.''

''We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.''

''Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.''

''There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.''

''Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.''

''All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.''

''The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.''

''How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of the body to think!''

''The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation.... He is the world's eye.''

''I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.''

''The remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.''

''Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.''

''The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.''

''You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys.''

''Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.''

''It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.''

''Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another.''

''Nature turns all malfaisance to good.''

''It is better to be alone than in bad company.''

''Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.''

''It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?''

''Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.''

''The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.''

''People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.''

''Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers.''

''Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.''

''Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.''

''Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.''

''By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.''

''The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.''

''To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.''

''I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.''

'''T is good-will makes intelligence.''

''A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him.''

''A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.''

''Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.''

''He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.''

''If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.''

''The first wealth is health.''

''There is some reason to believe that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.''

''The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon!''

''To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.''

''We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.''

''An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop.''

''And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.''

''Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits.''

''The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.''

''I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.''

''We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.''

''The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.''

''I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already.''

''But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.''

''To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, and have not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.''

''Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.''

''The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.''

''A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.''

''In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.''

''A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.''

''Here among the mountains the pinions of thought should be strong, and one should see the errors of men from a calmer height of love and wisdom.''

''Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.''

''It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.''

''In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.''

''Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.''

''The world globes itself in a drop of dew.''

''The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.''

''A man's library is a sort of harem.''

''Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.''

''Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?... You carry your fortune in your own hand.''

''In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much under-estimated.''

''The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.''

''The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.''

''America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.''

''I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.''

''You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.''

''Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One can not be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.''

''The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.''

''The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.''

''It is with a good book as it is with good company.''

''Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?''

''Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.''

''Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.''

''Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.''

''Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,—a certain robust and radiant physical health; or—shall I say?—great volumes of animal heat.''

''I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.''

''Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.''

''We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.''

''The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.''

''Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning.''

''I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king.''

''Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.''

''All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.''

''We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?''

''A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.''

''The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction.''

''There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.''

''The essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old.''

''I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.''

''Every thing teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.''

''Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.''

''Power and speed be hands and feet.''

''Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!''

''There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.''

''But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.''

''We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history.''

''I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.''

''Popularity is for dolls.''

''The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.''

''By going one step further back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.''

''Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.''

''We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.''

''We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.''

''There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic engagements, hold him to his task.''

''Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.''

''In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.''

''Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time.''

''In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.''

''A right rule for a club would be,—Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic.''

''The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it,—to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all.''

''But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.''

''In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of perspiration—out, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, avarice.''

''What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.''

''He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the house of pain.''

''That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.''

''I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.''

''Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.''

''Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.''

''All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.''

''As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.''

'''Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.''

''Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.''

''Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.''

''We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.''

''And yet—it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.''

''In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."''

''There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.''

''Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a few men.''

''Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.''

''My doom and my strength is to be solitary.''

''When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.''

''I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.''

''I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.''

''To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value.''

''In the country, without any interference from the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families.''

''We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.''

''Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists.''

''In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful.''

''I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.''

''American mind a wilderness of opportunities.''

''So far as man thinks, he is free.''

''He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.''

''Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.''

''But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes.''

''The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all beasts;" and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught."''

''Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society.''

''The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.''

''Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.''

''Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.''

''What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year?''

''Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.''

''A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.''

''The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.''

''The merit of those who fill a space in the world's history, who are borne forward, as it were, by the weight of thousands whom they lead, shed a perfume less sweet than do the sacrifices of private virtue.''

''All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not.''

''Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.''

''In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.''

''I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.''

''For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend.''

''A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.''

''The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.''

''The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.''

''Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.''

''Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.''

''For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life.''

''I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.''

''What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.''

''A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.''

''But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.''

''The highest compact we can make with our fellow is—"Let there be truth between us two forevermore."''

''In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.''

''Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.''

''A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies are made his friends and obey it as their own.''

''So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.''

''The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.''

''When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe.''

''The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.''

''The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.''

''The law of nature is, do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.''

''The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.''

''Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the ragged battle of fate, where strength is born.''

''Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes.''

''The tendency of things runs steadily to this point, namely, to put every man on his merits, and to give him so much power as he naturally exerts,—no more, no less.''

''It is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.''

''All successful men have agreed in one thing,—they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.''

''The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.''

''It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.''

''The great gifts are not got by analysis.''

''We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.''

''The eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things—"He saw that they were good."''

''Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.''

''Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.''

''Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.''

''The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.''

''You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.''

''The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place.''

''Never read any book that is not a year old.''

''The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.''

''The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.''

''The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.''

''We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.''

''The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.''

''I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.''

''You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, there is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his superlative effects.''

''The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.''

''The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,—life passed through the fire of thought.''

''Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.''

''The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.''

''Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.''

''You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.''

''We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.''

''Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.''

''As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.''

''Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.''

''Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.''

''A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.''

''Man was born rich, or inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties; by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual proposition.''

''When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied.''

''The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.''

''Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.''

''Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.''

''Our chief want in life, is, someone who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.''

''Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab?''

''The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.''

''The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conducted will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.''

''Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism.''

''Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day's work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.''

''Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them open.''

''If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.''

''Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful.''

''A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.''

''The street is full of humiliations to the proud.''

''No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.''

''Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.''

''Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.''

''Hard labor and spare diet they had, and off wooden trenchers, but they had peace and freedom, and the wailing of the tempest in the woods sounded kindlier in their ear than the smooth voice of the prelates, at home, in England.''

''Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.''

''The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.''

''Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.''

''Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.''

''Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.''

''Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that.''

''How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?''

''My hours are peaceful centuries.''

''Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered.''

''Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.''

''I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns, "The world is governed too much."''

''The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.''

''Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.''

''All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.''

''No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.''

''Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.''

''Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.''

''Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis.''

''What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.''

''If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.''

''Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit.''

''To think is to act.''

''Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.''

''Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.''

''If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now.''

''We might as easily reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.''

''It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.''

''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 a crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.''

''A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side.''

''The boxer's ring is the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed.''

''Every hero becomes a bore at last.''

''There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.''

''If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.''

''Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.''

''But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.''

''This is that which we call Character,—a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.''

''An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.''

''If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?''

''When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,—so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.''

''The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.''

''Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.''

''Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.''

''The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.''

''Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.''

''If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.''

''The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.''

''Every novel is a debtor to Homer.''

''We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.''

''Art and power will go on as they have done,—will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.''

''We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.''

''I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.''

''A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.''

''A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischief of their vices, but not from their vices.''

'''Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.''

''Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.''

''Our moods do not believe in each other.''

''The years teach much which the days never know.''

''The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.''

''If a man own land, the land owns him.''

''Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.''

''Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.''

''There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.''

''Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.''

''The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.''

''Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.''

''The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,—he will presently undervalue the actual object.''

''There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.''

''Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,''

''Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.''

''You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause.''

''I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.''

''Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.''

''The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.''

''I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.''

''Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.''

''The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.''

''But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.''

''For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.''

''We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.''

''A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of the men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.''

''The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury.''

''Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.''

''Mankind divides itself into two classes,—benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a handful.''

''We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.''

''We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.''

''The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.''

''Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?''

''O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book,—either without the other is naught.''

''And one may say boldly that 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.''

''Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.''

''It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire from sight and afterwards return again.''

''If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.''

''How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!''

''All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive.''

''People forget that it is the eye that makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.''

''We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.''

''Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.''

''The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.''

''No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!''

''Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.''

''People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.''

''A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.''

''A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.''

''Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away.''

''Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.''

''Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.''

''Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.''

''Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, or the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.''

''And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.''

''Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.''

''A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.''

''Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.''

''The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.''

''Power first, or no leading class. In politics and trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.''

''The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.''

''The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we must have a society.''

''I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.''

''Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.''

''It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.''

''An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.''

''The vanishing volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the Adamantine Record of the past.''

''All the great ages have been ages of belief.''

''All things are known to the soul.''

''Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?''

''The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.''

''The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days & more of them, than any other country.''

''We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.''

''Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.''

''Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.''

''The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.''

''Strange is this alien despotism of Sleep which takes two persons lying in each other's arms & separates them leagues, continents, asunder.''

''Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.''

''Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!''

''Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.''

''The reality is more excellent than the report.''

''The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.''

''Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of trade.''

''The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.''

''Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.''

''Only poetry inspires poetry.''

''I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.''

''The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.''

''Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.''

''The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.''

''Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.''

''The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.''

''Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.''

''No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic, also.''

''All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.''

''My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.''

''Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.''

''There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.''

''A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.''

''A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.''

''The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity.''

''Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.''

''The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.''

''It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know.''

''Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?''

''In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.''

''The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.''

''Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household.''

''Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.''

''Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.''

''Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.''

''In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.''

''Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.''

''For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?''

''The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.''

''The words I and mine constitute ignorance.''

''Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time.''

''The highest end of government is the culture of men.''

''Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.''

''There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.''

''Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.''

''Old age begins in the nursery, and before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, "I want something which I never saw before" and "I wish I was not I."''

''The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo.''

''We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.''

''The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?''

''Music and Wine are one.''

''To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.''

''Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.''

''The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.''

''The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.''

''We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.''

''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 Scholar is a candle which the love & desire of men will light. Let it not lie in a dark box.''

''A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.''

''Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.''

''Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.''

''There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.''

''I like people who like Plato.''

''The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish,—all duties even.''

''It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.''

''The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.''

''For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.''

''Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.''

''To be great is to be misunderstood.''

''Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.''

''A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.''

''Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.''

''In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.''

''It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities.''

''A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth.''

''We should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries.''

''General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.''

''We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry,—a narrow belt.''

''Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd."''

''Give me the eye to see a navy in an acorn. What is there of the divine in a load of bricks? What of the divine in a barber's shop or a privy? Much, all.''

''I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage.''

''Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—the sweet, without the other side,—the bitter.''

''Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.''

''As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress of the character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.''

''A little integrity is better than any career.''

''It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.''

''And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.''

''You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.''

''Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.''

''The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.''

''I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.''

''Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.''

''In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class.''

''A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.''

''Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.''

''The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.''

''I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places.''

''Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.''

''There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.''

''Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.''

''The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.''

''The covetousness or the malignity, which saddens me, when I ascribe it to society, is my own. I am environed by my self.''

''The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.''

''Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.''

''It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.''

''There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.''

''Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.''

''Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.''

''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.''

''Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.''

''Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and the good.''

''A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet and serve him for a horse.''

''Our thinking is a pious reception.''

''The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.''

''Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious.''

''Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.''

''Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.''

''Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.''

''The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.''

''We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.''

''Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.''

''Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism.''

''That work is ever more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required. How wistfully, when we have promised to attend the working committee, we look at the distant hills and their seductions.''

''Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?''

''In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.''

''New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.''

''In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.''

''There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.''

''For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.''

''We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.''

''There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.''

''As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.''

''The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.''

''When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.''

''What is the hardest task in the world? To think.''

''Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.''

''For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.''

''There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.''

''Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.''

''We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.''

''Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.''

''The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.''

''We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.''

''Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.''

''Everything good is on the highway.''

''There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.''

''Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.''

''I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.''

''The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.''

''Life will show you masks that are worth all of your carnivals.''

''You sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.''

''In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.''

''They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is rare and casual.''

''Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.''

''Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.''

''The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?''

''Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.''

''Character teaches above our wills.''

''Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but will pick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.''

''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.''

''It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.''

''The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with slavery.''

''When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.''

''There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow- storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.''

''In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive.''

''But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes.''

''Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.''

''Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.''

''Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.''

''Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached.''

''How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.''

''Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.''

''The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.''

''It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifference to death.''

''I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.''

''Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.''

''Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves.''

''Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?''

''Fear always springs from ignorance.''

''A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.''

''Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.''

''Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.''

''Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no account.''

''It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.''

''The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.''

''Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.''

''The intellect,—that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.''

''We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be their toys.''

''Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.''

''How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of life!''

''Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.''

''Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts.''

''What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is always right.''

''The vulgar call good fortune that which really is produced by the calculations of genius.''

''How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.''

''But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart.''

''Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.''

''It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple.''

''A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.''

''If you would learn to write, 't is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home.''

''A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.''

''A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.''

''A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.''

''The finished man of the world must eat of every apple at once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.''

''The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from the sleep of passions to their rage.''

''A man should give us a sense of mass.''

''I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.''

''He represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of explanation.''

''The Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman added the shirt.''

''Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.''

''In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.''

''So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.''

''The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.''

''In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.''

''Flowers ... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.''

''All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.''

''Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.''

''A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.''

''The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.''

''Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.''

''Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.''

'''T is worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance he is admired, but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple.''

''There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.''

''A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.''

''Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more.''

''The eye is the best of artists.''

''Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.''

''Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.''

''The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.''

''All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.''

''If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.''

''For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman.''

''Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none.''

''We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion.''

''There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work.''

''Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.''

''For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.''

''Hitch your wagon to a star.''

''It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage of society; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own.''

''Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.''

''For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.''

''For the most part, the town has deserved the name it wears. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws, no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.''

''Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities!''

''Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.''

''Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.''

''Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.''

''We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.''

''A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.''

''It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.''

''The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.''

''Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.''

''To answer a question so as to admit of no reply, is the test of a man.''

''Nature is the symbol of the spirit.''

''From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events.''

''The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.''

''Graceful women, chosen men Dazzle every mortal: Their sweet and lofty countenance His enchanting food.''

''Every man is actually weak, and apparently strong. To himself, he seems weak; to others, formidable.''

''We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.''

''The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.''

''What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.''

''So your work and you shall reinforce yourself.''

''But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.''

''Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience.''

''I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause.''

''Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.''

''Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is. Beware of the man who says, "I am on the eve of a revelation."''

''It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement, as all boys kill cats.''

''Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.''

''The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.''

''Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.''

''Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.''

''In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.''

''A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.''

''How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes.''

''Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust- hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too. Their extravagance from nature is yet within a higher nature.''

''Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.''

''I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.''

''The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed, or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State.''

''In the woods, is perpetual youth.''

''In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.''

''Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.''

''Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.''

''But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.''

''The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.''

''In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.''

''The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.''

''What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for the ages has signified cunning, intimating that the state is a trick?''

''The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded in the first man.''

''The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.''

''Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.''

''There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.''

''The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.''

''The fatal trait is the divorce between religion and morality.''

''Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.... Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.''

''If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.''

''There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,—kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,—the roots of all things are in man.''

''The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.''

''The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.''

''When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it.''

''The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable.''

''In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.''

''The too much contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.''

''Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up.''

''When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.''

''We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.''

''Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.''

'''Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.''

''The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.''

''Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.''

''Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.''

''Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.''

''Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.''

''The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.''

''A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips.''

''Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.''

''Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.''

''If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.''

''But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.''

''The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.''

''But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.''

''The faith that stands on authority is not faith.''

''The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.''

''The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed.''

''But the strong and healthy yeoman and husbands of the land, the self-sustaining class of inventive and industrious men, fear no competition or superiority. Come what will, their faculty cannot be spared.''

''He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.''

''It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.''

''There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.''

''Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.''

''I do not hesitate to read ... all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment.''

''My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.''

''Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.''

''Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.''

''The wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.''

''The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.''

''Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.''

''England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them.''

''It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.''

''Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.''

''We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.''

''Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.''

''The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.''

''Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.''

''A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.''

''Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.''

''In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.''

''The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.''

''You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find.''

''It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him.''

''The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.''

''If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.''

''The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.''

''The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.''

''This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.''

''History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do.''

''Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.''

''Man is the dwarf of himself.''

''What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of.''

''A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.''

''An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.''

''But Nature is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.''

''Art expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol.''

''In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.''

''Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.''

''The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.''

''The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.''

''An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.''

''He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.''

''Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.''

''Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.''

''Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.''

''For Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation;Mnot a superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works.''

''I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.''

''Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.''

''It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments.''

''In every naked negro of those thousands, they saw a future customer.''

''Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.''

''But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of reason.''

''Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building.''

''Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.''

''We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things.''

''It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members.''

''If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free.''

''A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.''

''The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.''

''Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.''

''Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.''

''A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.''

''The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.''

''When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.''

''To each they offer gifts after his will,''

''Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.''

''Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.''

''Health, south wind, books, old trees, a boat, a friend.''

''For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.''

''In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.''

''Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive. An empire is an immense egotism.''

''I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.''

''These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.''

''The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.''

''Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.''

''We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.''

''Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.''

''A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.''

''The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.''

''All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.''

''Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.''

''Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.''

''What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!''

''Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.''

''Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowing vigor.''

''Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.''

''To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables.''

''The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.''

''The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.''

''Language is the archives of history.''

''Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.''

''There is always safety in valor.''

''It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person,—"Always do what you are afraid to do."''

''The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.''

''Pure by impure is not seen.''

''Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.''

''Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of a secret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.''

''Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.''

''The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.''

''Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.''

''When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.''

''I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.''

''Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!''

''If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.''

''In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.''

''The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.''

''We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.''

''There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.''

''To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.''

''Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.''

''The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate.''

''It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.''

''Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.''

''It is very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.''

''A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.''

''Be a gift and a benediction.''

''We walk on molten lava on which the claw of a fly or the fall of a hair makes its impression, which being received, the mass hardens to flint and retains every impression forevermore.''

''If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.''

''A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.''

''There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.''

''Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within sleep.''

''The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the engine restricts one more act of the engineer,—unteaches him.''

''We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner.''

''Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.''

''Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.''

''To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.''

''Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.''

''Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.''

''Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.''

''Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.''

''We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.''

''The surest poison is time.''

''In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.''

''In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.''

''I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,—and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.''

''For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.''

''We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.''

''The world is his, who has money to go over it.''

''When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea—that conserves it; ideas only save races.''

''Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.''

''In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.''

''The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.''

''There is some awe mixed with joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well nigh thought and said.''

''A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.''

''Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.''

''But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;Mcinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.''

''Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.''

''One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail.''

''The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.''

''Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.''

''The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.''

''The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.''

''As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.''

''We go to Europe to be Americanized.''

''Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and tavern.''

''Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.''

''A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.''

''I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.''

'''Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.''

''If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him.''

''To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips.''

''The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.''

''Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end.''

''The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence.''

''Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.''

''Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.''

''Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.''

''In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.''

''We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.''

''Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.''

''The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.''

''I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.''

''Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.''

''But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.''

''All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.''

''A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.''

''A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.''

''If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.''

''We do what we must, and call it by the best names.''

''I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what has been done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.''

''A moment is a concentrated eternity.''

''It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality.''

''The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.''

''The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.''

''Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.''

''Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character; after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.''

''The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon.''

''Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.''

''From Washington, proverbially "the city of distances," through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.''

''We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess.''

''What I am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts to hold it back.''

''Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.''

''Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.''

'''Tis a queer life, and the only humour proper to it seems quiet astonishment. Others laugh, weep, sell, or proselyte. I admire.''

''No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.''

''Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers.''

''The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.''

''A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.''

''Is not a man better than a town?''

''The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.''

''But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge.''

''The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served.''

''The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.''

''Nature never sends a great man onto the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.''

''Time is indeed the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century and dwarfs an age to an hour.''

''We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.''

''Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.''

''If in the least particular one could derange the order of nature,—who would accept the gift of life?''

''The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple.''

''All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.''

''You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor.''

''The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.''

''Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.''

''Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.''

''Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.''

''Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.''

''The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.''

''Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.''

''A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.''

''The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.''

''Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities.''

''Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.''

''The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all.''

''Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others' eyes.''

''A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds.''

''The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.''

''Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank.... Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.''

''Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.''

''I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.''

''No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.''

''There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.''

''The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,— 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like.''

''The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.''

''And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done. What is useful will last, what is hurtful will sink.''

''Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.''

''And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market.''

''Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.''

''Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.''

''The maxim of courts is that manner is power.''

''There is also something excellent in every audience,—the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.''

''Genius is its own end.''

''It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.''

''Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.''

''Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.''

''Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.''

''I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.''

''We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.''

''Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.''

''I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.''

''But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.''

''It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.''

''We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards the corn for high prices, is the preventative of famine; and the law of self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be.''

'''Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.''

''Life is a search after power: and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,—that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.''

''Good criticism is very rare and always precious.''

''What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.''

''A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.''

''The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.''

''An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe."''

''The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.''

''In a tumultuous privacy of storm.''

''Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.''

''No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature has taken to heart.''

''Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.''

''To the men of this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone gave reason.''

''When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.''

''Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.''

''We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.''

''As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar's history will paint out Caesar.''

''Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.''

''Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed in retirement.''

''A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero.''

''Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.''

''Nature is upheld by antagonism.''

''There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.''

''Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.''

''Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.''

''Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy, and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear his call to go and be their king?''

''All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.''

''The blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery.''

''Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.''

''What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms.''

''What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.''

''The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.''

''Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.''

''Be a little careful of your Library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here & get books that will open your eyes, & your ears, & your curiosity, & turn you inside out or outside in.''

''A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.''

''It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.''

''There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.''

''Intellect is a fire; rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm.''

''Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled.''

''Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.''

'''Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.''

''The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.''

''The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.''

''Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.''

''A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.''

''Galileo, with an operaglass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than anyone since.''

''The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;Msees that what is must be and ought to be, or is the best.''

''All mankind love a lover.''

''Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, or accept another's dogmatism.''

''Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.''

''Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.''

''Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.''

''The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective.''

''So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.''

''Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.''

''By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.''

''The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.''

''Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.''

''But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.''

''We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.''

''Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.''

''We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism.''

''Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.''

''We boil at different degrees.''

''As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.''

''Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a country.''

''Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.''

''What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car!''

''What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.''

''Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.''

''Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.''

''I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—that were a bath and a medicine.''

''People seem sheathed in their tough organization.''

''Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.''