Only poetry inspires poetry.
Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.
More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.
There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.
Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.
To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.
