Only poetry inspires poetry.
We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
The years teach much what the days never knew.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.
Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Life too near paralyses art.
Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
Real love begins when nothing is expected in return.
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to prepare for the long haul, the rise and fall, and let neither define your sense of self.
