A man is a god in ruins.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
The city is recruited from the country.
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.
