Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.
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 once well done is done forever.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.