The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many...
The ways by which you may get your money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earn money 'merely' is to be truly idle or worse. If the labourer gets no more than...
There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry. Homer and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how th...
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. [...] They were not time subtracted f...
They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about m...
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, wha...
We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,– I hear an irresistible voice which invit...
What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers?
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, They do not make them so now, not emphasizing the They at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, a...
When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were...
You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of ever...
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