"I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."

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"Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."

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"Live your life, do your work, then take your hat."

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"As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution."

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"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."

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"If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?"

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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

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"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark."

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"Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit."

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"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

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"There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect."

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"Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe."

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"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

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"If one advances confidently in the directions of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

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"Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake."

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"For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it."

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"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds."

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"Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?"

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"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?"

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"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."

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"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

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"The heart is forever inexperienced."

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"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

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"In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains."

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"Being is the great explainer."

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"Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced."

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"It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar."

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"The eye is the jewel of the body."

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"My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."

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"Men are born to succeed, not to fail."

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"We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not."

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"Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants."

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"The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures."

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"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness."

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"Even the best things are not equal to their fame."

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"Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor."

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"By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber."

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"We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same."

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"People die of fright and live of confidence."

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"The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled."

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