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