As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.
There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon—said Damodara,
The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but it is instinct.
The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orato...
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.
My practice is nowhere, my opinion is here.
Morning brings back the heroic ages.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they ma...
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the...
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, w...
A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Politics is the gizzard of society full of gut and gravel.
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours.