The sun is but a morning star.
One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.
To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.
I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.
It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.
Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
