The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies
The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
Sometimes, in a summer morning,having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrisetill noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,in undisturbed solitude an...
Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be...
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.
I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do.
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any politi...
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.
The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh...
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.
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.