If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves.

Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. 

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.

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.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency.

The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. 

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

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

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

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

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.

Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home.

Everything good is on the highway.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

What is true anywhere is true everywhere.

That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Free should the scholar be, — free and brave… Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance… The world is his, who can see through its pretension.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

The boy wishes to learn to skate, to coast, to catch a fish in the brook, to hit a mark with a snowball or a stone; and a boy a little older is just as well pleased to teach him these sciences.

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