Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.
What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.
Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.
The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.
The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.
Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.
If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.
Be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.
Violet! sweet violet! Thine eyes are full of tears; Are they wet Even yet With the thought of other years?
It is right precious to behold The first long surf of climbing light Flood all the thirsty east with gold.
Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.
The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.
Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
The purely Great Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere, Thou nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.
Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
Not a deed would he do, Not a word would he utter, Till he's weighed its relation To plain bread and butter.
Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven.
It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.
If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp.
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.
Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.
The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.
Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.
There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.
Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.