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