Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.
It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.
Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.
It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.
Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.
Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.
Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.
I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.
