The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force – that thoughts rule the world.
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.
Every wall is a door.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.
Life is our dictionary.
I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
The first wealth is health.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Pages: 1 2
