We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity.

It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmered Dorian.” 

“If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.” 

“It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.” 

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely… but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them.

“because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.” 

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions.

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

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

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

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven. 

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.

“It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.” 

“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.” 

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.