By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is w...
In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first...
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern wo...
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and brin...
Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rar...
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware...
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
What is once well done is done forever.
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
I have travelled a good deal in Concord.
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but t...
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
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