Hitch your wagon to a star.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Sorrow makes us children again.
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
Wear none of thine own Chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.
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.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.
