Intelligent Quotes

“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”

“The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

“The years teach much which the days never know.”

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“It was for beauty that the world was made.”

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

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”

“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”

“Good criticism is very rare, and always precious.”

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.”

“The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price—and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing without its price—is not less sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states.”

“Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its law, and conduct you to a higher degree of power. You must obey your heart.”

“The only sin is limitation.”

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.”

“If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not safe.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”

“Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

“Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax.”

“The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and would embrace at last the universal sphere.”

“The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace.”

“If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”

“No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.”

“The law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.”

“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. This is our permanent state.”

“The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.”

“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”

“In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent.”

“All successful men have agreed in one thing—they were causationists.”

“Happy is the house that shelters a friend!”

“A little integrity is better than any career.”

“If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.”

“For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.”

“There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us.”

“The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars.”

“Love the day.”

“Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility.”

“There is no knowledge that is not power”

“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.”

“The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.”

“You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”

“What is the hardest task in the world? To think.”

“We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.”

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”

“Best use of money is to pay debts.”

“He who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom.”

“There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

“But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create—to create—is the proof of a divine presence.”

“The first wealth is health.”

“Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.”

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”

“The right investment is in tools of your trade.”

“Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy.”

“We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”

“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.”

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.”

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”

“Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.”

“That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”

“I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.”

“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

“I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”

“The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills of income, though never so small, being added, wealth begins.”

“With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

“The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are: 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like.”

“Every thing impossible, until we see a success.”

“I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”

“Grief too will make us idealists.”

“Character is higher than intellect.”

“In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us.”

“I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home.”

“We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its ends; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality and the most ascending quality.”

“My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“Our spontaneous action is always the best.”

“If a man owns land, the land owns him.”

“Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood.”

“Life is our dictionary.”

“Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society.”

“If you see smoke, there must be fire.”

“If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.”

“Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if it is off from that.”

“Beauty is the quality which makes to endure.”

“It is better to be alone than in bad company.”

“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”

“It is commonly observed, that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.”

“Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider.”

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.”

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.”

“Practice is nine tenths.”

“That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it.”

“Fear always springs from ignorance.”

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

“All our science lacks a human side.”

“The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.”

“There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.”

“Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.”

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

“Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.”

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.”

“If a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

“I do not hesitate to read all the books I have named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment.”

“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”

“In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies.”

“We must be our own [friend] before we can be another’s.”

“Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.”

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”

“To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.”

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”

“Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

“True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear, as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.”

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”