Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness..

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of ….

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers wh….

Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws..

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other..

We may be partial, but Fate is not..

God screens us evermore from premature ideas..

The life of man is a self-evolving circle..

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his se….

Society is a hospital of incurables..

It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail..

Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live..

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world,….

The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, m….

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..

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

One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men.".

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you w….

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the….

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress ….

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor..