Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Emerson

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene.

A good intention clothes itself with sudden power.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.

A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.

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 no peace.

A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Accuracy is essential to beauty.

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.

Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life!

All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

All great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

All mankind love a lover.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

All men are poets at heart.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.***We quote not only books and proverbs, but art, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.***

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody’s natural superiority.

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become his masters.

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings’ palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicate the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent.

All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having.

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome;” and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.

Art and power will go on as they have done—will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will imbitter his days, and spoil him for his proper work.

As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.

As you are old and reverend, you should he wise.

Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen, could not untie.

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Body cannot teach wisdom; God only.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight we quote.

By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

Cause and effect are the chancellors of God.

Character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and grey hairs.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie—for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance.

Character is centrality, the impossibility of being overthrown.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.

Character is moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature.

Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness,—to love Him in others’ virtues.

Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

Cities give us collision. ’Tis said London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

Consistency is the bugbear that frightens little minds.

Conversation is a game of circles.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought.

Conversation, which, when it is best, is a series of intoxications.

Coolness, and absence of heat and haste, indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise, a lady is serene.

Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal.

Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of woman.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers, as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. ’Tis king against king. It is ever the romance of history in all dynasties—the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,—epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody.

Duty grows everywhere—like children, like grass.

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value.

Each mind has its own method.

Education should be as broad as man.

Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.

Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man.

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

Enthusiasm goes out.

Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Every book is a quotation, and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries, and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptations we resist.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm.

Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.

Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon.

Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.

Every natural action is graceful.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.

Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious, if unmixed; and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man’s peculiarity to superabound.

Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat.

Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages; they wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

Fate is unpenetrated causes.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Fear is cruel and mean.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents—flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.

Friendship buys friendship.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

Genius is intellect constructive.

Genius, even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm.

Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning or owning them; they solicit him to enter and possess.

God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to reflection is the thinking of the mind.

God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, and you can never have both.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.

Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

Great men are sincere.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

Greatness appeals to the future.

Greek architecture is the flowering of geometry.

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men,—of men in distant countries and in past times.

He is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn; and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.

He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.

Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection.

Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

How cunningly Nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom—in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.

Hume’s doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

I believe that our experience instructs us that the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know and what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret.

I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed, whether Arab in the desert or Frenchman in the Academy, I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.

I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

I think sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

If the gatherer gathers too much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.

If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone.

If you believe in fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.

In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures, faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term “abandonment,” to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd.

In every man’s memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoön how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

In the woods, too, man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and, at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

It is a cold, lifeless business, when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.

It is a rule in games of chance that “the cards beat all the players;” and revolutions disconcert and outwit all the insurgents.

It is a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

It is always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

It is defeat which educates us.

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is.

It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone.

It is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe. ’Tis a long scale from the gorilla to the gentleman,—from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare,—to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summit of science, art, and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is an always accelerated march.

It is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

It is the property of the religious spirit to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no culture of the tastes, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, or even depth of affection, can bestow that delicacy and that grandeur of bearing which belong only to the mind accustomed to celestial conversation,—all else is but gilt and cosmetics, beside this, as expressed in every look and gesture.

It is wonderful how much talent runs into manners.

It is wonderful how soon a piano fits into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.

Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Language is fossil poetry.

Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds.

Let us be silent, so we may hear the whisper of the gods.

Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high human office,—a sacrament when its aim is grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom or for love or devotion.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

Liberty is a slow fruit.

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged—that no honest seeker goes unrewarded.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

Life itself is a bubble and a scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Like Shakespeare, for all time.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.

Man was born to be rich, or inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,—benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Morality is the object of government.

Most natures are insolvent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

Möller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive.

Music is the poor man’s Parnassus.

My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.

Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature?

Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.

Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love.

Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds and see prismatic dewdrops; but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.

Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

Nature is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.

Nature is sanitive, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

Nature tells every secret once.

Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself.

Necessity does everything well.

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

No nation has produced anything like his equal. There is no quality in the human mind, there is no class of topics, there is no region of thought, in which he has not soared or descended, and none in which he has not said the commanding word.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn; nature’s oldest force is as good as new.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it has been taken for it.

Nothing is fair or good alone.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others’ eyes.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last.

O rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night, and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart, the power of love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

O world, what pictures and what harmonies are thine!

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

Of all wit’s uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

Oh, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,—for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.

One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Only by the supernatural is a man strong—only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist—nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.

Only so much do I know as I have lived.

Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Out from the heart of Nature rolled the burdens of the Bible old.

Patience and fortitude conquer all things.

People are to be taken in very small doses.

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day’s work.

Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

Pride eradicates all vices but itself.

Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.

Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth or a student in divinity.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman—repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.

Revolutions never go backwards.

Right is more beautiful than private affection, and is compatible with universal wisdom.

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.

Science***necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger insights.

Self-command is the main elegance.

Self-love is, in almost all men, such an overweight that they are incredulous of a man’s habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

Society is a troop of thinkers and the best heads among them take the best places.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking; some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.

Some men at the approach of a dispute neigh like horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not words,—as steps in a dance are not steps,—but reproduce the genius of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of the bell merely, whilst the church chimes in the distance bring the church and its serious memories before us.

Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.

Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and therefore literature’s. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

Strongly stamped, medallion-like sayings.

Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.

Such another peerless queen only could her mirror show.

Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid.

Talent for talents’ sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars! who climb each night the ancient sky.

Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much trust the power by which it lives?

The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star,—she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.

The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other.

The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

The beautiful is never plentiful.

The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

The best of life is conversation.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.

The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.

The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.

The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,—imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority—demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice—comes graceful and beloved as a bride.

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.

The finest poetry was first experience.

The finest wits have their sediment.

The firmest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

The first lesson of history is the good of evil.

The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power—the gentleman.

The foible of weak minds.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment.

The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far.

The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.

The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.

The growth of the intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is,—let there be truth between us two forevermore.***It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him; we need not reinforce ourselves or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself; if he did thus or thus, I know it was right.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavor to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which in the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.

The loud type of vulgarity.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon.

The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.

The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom meanness withholds some important benefit.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.

The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.

The one prudence in life is concentration.

The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.***Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

The only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The only thing that grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

The orator is thereby an orator that keeps his feet ever on a fact.

The ornaments of a home are the friends who frequent it.

The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.

The pest of society is egotists.

The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it—to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all.

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

The ragged cliff has thousand faces in a thousand hours.

The rain comes when the wind calls.

The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same of a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

The religions we call false were once true. They also were affirmations of the conscience correcting the evil customs of their times.

The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

The soul knows no persons.

The street is full of humiliations to the proud.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.

The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption,—pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they entertain—they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.

The Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence. It invites to the noblest solitude and to the noblest society.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.

The true ship is the ship builder.

The truest test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops; no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.

The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas winch supersede all histories.

There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.

There comes a period of the imagination to each—a later youth—the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.

There is a kind of latent omniscience, not only in every man, but in every particle.

There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?

There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,—that is, the poet.

There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.

There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

There is always safety in valor.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. ’Tis the doctrine of faith over works.

There is hope in extravagance, there is none in routine.

There is no beautifier of complexion or form or behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.

There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox, and squirrel and mole.

There is no God dare wrong a worm.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; there is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.

There is no true orator who is not a hero.

There is nothing capricious in nature. In nature the implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.

There is properly no history, only biography.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.

They are the strong ones of the earth, the mighty food for good or evil,—those who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and a grief to them; those who give time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation, or to the powers of wrath to stamp upon them their withering passage.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evil they fear.

This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name,—this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

This gives force to the strong—that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

This is that which we call character,—a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

Thoughts rule the world.

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

Thus is man made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

’T is the good reader that makes the good book: a good head cannot read amiss.

’Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to the health of man, and to his highest powers, so as to be, in some manner, the source of intellect.

’Tis goodwill makes intelligence.

’Tis the best use of fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of destiny.

’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss, in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise.

True wit never made us laugh.

Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.

Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind’s eye to read its oracles.

Truth is the summit of being.

Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Universally, the better gold the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold mine country that is traversed by good roads, or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected.

Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,—familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe’s rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery.

Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,—a long way leading nowhere.

Vigor is contagious; and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers.

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty mother, who had been so sly with us, as if she felt she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old,—reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

We can only obey our own polarity.

We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it, let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators of the old. We do not believe in the richness of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence.

We do not believe, or we forget, that “the Holy Ghost came down, not in shape of a vulture, but in the form of a dove.”

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.

We know who is benevolent by quite other means than the amount of subscription to soup societies. It is only low merits that can be enumerated.

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man.

We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind—yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.

We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.

We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.

We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father or his mother comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least,—and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess.

Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child—the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation,—soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion.

What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village, and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? “He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much.” Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health!

What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter’s cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.

What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often waste its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

What we seek, we shall find; what we flee from, flees from us.

What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.

When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combats.

When half-gods go, the gods arrive.

When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,—no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.”

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature’s game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

When the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, nor the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.

When the Master of the universe has points to carry in His government He impresses His will in the structure of minds.

When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?

Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons.

Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Who loses a day loses life.

Wisdom is infused into every form.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,—a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinction. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any immunity; they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly beggar.

Women see through Claude Lorraines.

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.

You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.

You will always find those who think they know your duty better than you know it.

Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Youth is everywhere in place.