All Quotes

"Never read any book that is not a year old."

"I should as soon think of swimming across 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."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time."

"Music is the poor man's Parnassus."

"The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."

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

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

"Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."

"The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends."

"This world belongs to the energetic."

"Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be."

"Every artist was first an amateur."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment."

"Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him."

"A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands."

"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit."

"So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours."

"The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible."

"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."

"A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man."

"Everything intercepts us from ourselves."

"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too."

"Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding."

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom."

"Children are all foreigners."

"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state."

"He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is."

"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence."

"How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes."

"A good indignation brings out all one's powers."

"People say law but they mean wealth."

"People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent."

"Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

"Blessed are those who have no talent!"

"The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan."

"I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a 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 will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."

"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle."

"The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page."