“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.”
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
“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.”
“That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.”
“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.”
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
“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.”
“I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.”
“The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.”
“There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.”
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.”
“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
“There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”