“How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”
“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”
“There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
“I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.”
“Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.”
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
“Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.”
“True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.”
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
“Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
“I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.”
“It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.”
“The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.”
“I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.”
“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
“When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.”
“The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.”
“The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.”
“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.”
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
“Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.”
“We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.”
“The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.”
“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.”
“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?”
“The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.”
“Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.”