A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.

The Upanishads and the Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.

The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

Self-command is the main elegance.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

Nature is the best posture-master.

When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... It is only within this century [the 1800 's] that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations.

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

We boil at different degrees.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.

There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle.

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection.

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

Revolutions never go backwards.

Shallow men believe in luck.

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Skepticism is slow suicide.

No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me.

What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

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

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6. Nature, Addresses and Lectures.

Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.

I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

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.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old - reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

Nothing can be preserved that is not good.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,-a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,-if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.