The only wealth is life.
I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.
It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.
Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.
Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
Acorns were good until bread was found.
Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.
It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.
Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.
