I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his 'furniture,' as whether it is insured or not. 'But what shall I do with my f...
Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to b...
A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors
For my greatest skill has been to want but little.
What danger is there if you don't think of any?),
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
There is not so good an understanding between any two but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Simplicity simplicity simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard
Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
Those whom we can love, we can hate to others we are indifferent.
Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.