You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know that is true knowledge.

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The man who goes alone can start today but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.

I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.

Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.