Revolutions go not backward.
People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
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.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
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.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Every old poem is sacred.
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
