Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.
I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.
The listlessness of it all, the profit off depression, the extinction of an entire species, the chlorinated connections- poisoned just to appear clean.
We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.
Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.
Property is organized robbery.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
