An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or rou...
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...
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. [; November 16, 1857]
Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
In short, all good things are wild and free.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Do what you love. Know your own bone gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
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...
I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.
I suppose that I have not many months to live: but of course I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
Things do not change we change.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.