Every old poem is sacred.
What do sad complaints avail if the offense is not cut down by punishment.
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?
We are free to yield to truth.
The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Opening amenities are often opening inanities.
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.
Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.
She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.
The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.
Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
