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.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.
The years teach much what the days never knew.
Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
Revolutions go not backward.
Language is the archives of history.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
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.
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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