While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
The man who goes alone can start today but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet...
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
We know but few man, a great many coats and breeches.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality...
In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Men have become the tools of their tools.