“People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”
“It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.”
“The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.”
“Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.”
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
“The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.”
“Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.”
“I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.”
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
“This gives force to the strong -- that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.”
“I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose...”
“The highest compact we can make with our fellow is --''Let there be truth between us two forevermore.''”
“What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.”
“If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.”
“Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.”
“Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.”
“Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?”
“When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.”
“Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.”
“Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.”
“Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
“That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.”
“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.”
“To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”
“Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.”
“No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.”
“The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.”
“To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.”