“We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.”
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
“The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”
“The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.”
“There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.”
“Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.”
“A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.”
“I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.”
“Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.”
“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.”
“It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
“Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, ''If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?”
“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”
“Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.”
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.”
“The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.”
“Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.''”
“Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived.”
“We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.”
“Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.”
“We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”
“I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.”
“The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.”
“Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.”
“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.”
“Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.”
“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
“Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.”
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.”
“These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.”