It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment. 

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Brahma, st. 1 Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation. Though titled "Brahma" its expressions are actually more indicative of the Hindu concept "Brahman"

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

We boil at different degrees.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

To live without duties is obscene.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science. 

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.

A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be heroic.

What potent blood hath modest May!

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," - "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, - what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never "talk shop" before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.

And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.

In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

This world belongs to the energetic.

It is time to be old, To take in sail: - The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: 'No more!

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.