All mankind love a lover.
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.
He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
There is a crack in everything God has made.
It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.
The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.
Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?
When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
