People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Our faith comes in moments our vice is habitual.
The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Nature hates calculators.
Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
A great man is always willing to be little.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Earth laughs in flowers.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Beauty without expression is boring.
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Our best thoughts come from others.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
Power and speed be hands and feet.
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body in the evening, only with his legs.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt but so are lies.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
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.
The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
With the past, I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
All diseases run into one, old age.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
Money often costs too much.
The years teach much which the days never know.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
All mankind love a lover.
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.