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.

Nature is the best posture-master.

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.

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

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.

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.

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

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."

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

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

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

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

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.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

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

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.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

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 most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

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

Hitch your wagon to a star.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

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

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

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!

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, - "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die."

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"

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.

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

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

The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!

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

What potent blood hath modest May!

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.

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

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

We boil at different degrees.

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.

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.

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

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.