With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
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.
Reality is a sliding door.
Men are respectable only as they respect.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
An empire is an immense egotism.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.
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