We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Money often costs too much.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

We are wiser than we know.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

The earth laughs in flowers.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.