If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.
The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
Men's hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another and all against evil only.
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
Speech is silver, silence is golden.
Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.
Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.
The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
The hell of these days is the fear of not getting along, especially of not making money.
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.
No pressure, no diamonds.
There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.
Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
See deep enough, and you see musically.
Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.
Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.
The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.
Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
Of all God's creatures, Man alone is poor.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.
Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.
He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
All great peoples are conservative.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Without kindness there can be no true joy.
Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.
A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
There is so much data available to us, but most data won't help us succeed.
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
Endurance is patience concentrated.
A man lives by believing something.
Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.
Have a purpose in life, and having it, throw into your work such strength of mind and muscle as God has given you.
It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.
They only are wise who know that they know nothing.
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.
Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
Speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking.
You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist - all he must learn are the two words "supply" and "demand."
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.
A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth.
The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.
Habit is the deepest law of human nature
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.
The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
The genuine essence of truth never dies.
A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.
One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
