The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
As for doing good that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
¡La laguna de Flint! Nuestra nomenclatura es pobre. ¿Qué derecho tenía el sucio y estúpido granjero, cuya granja lindaba con esta agua celestial, a darle su nombre tras haber desnudado sin piedad sus...
We think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go...
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save...
Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who...
When you right or extricate a ducking businessman (take him out of chancery) and set him before the wind again, it is worth the while to look and see if he has any seed of success under him. Such a on...
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...
When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do.
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and m...
Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off...
What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body...
We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is...
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 cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.
We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered t...