All Quotes

"We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul."

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent."

"In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."

"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant."

"To live without duties is obscene."

"There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better."

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

"I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion."

"Every man is a new method."

"A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation."

"Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh."

"What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another."

"The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters."

"The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny."

"I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find."

"Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know."

"Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him."

"You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'"

"I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him."

"I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible"

"What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?"

"It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

"Plato was synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly Oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color."

"The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world."

"[The Upanishads and the Vedas] haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace."

"When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... It is only within this century [the 1800 's] that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations."

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

"For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?"

"If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6."

"The virtues of society are the vices of the saints."

"The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."

"In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed."

"Shallow men believe in luck."

"Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right."

"The faith that stands on authority is not faith."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose."

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

"Self-trust is the first secret of success."

"No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me."

"Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment."

"Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!"

"Variation: If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door."

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

"I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us."

"Nature is the best posture-master."

"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. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure."

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

"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."

"Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep."