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These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words—self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.
The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past,—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed.
The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to the record.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.
But genius always looks forward.
To create,—to create,—is the proof of a divine presence.
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.
The Arabian proverb says, “A fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful.”
3. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian,—as unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a penknife for an axe.
The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action.
Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.
All things are double, one against another.—Tit
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him,” said Burke.
The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin,” is sound philosophy.
But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
A great man is always willing to be little.
we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”
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.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.
But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
“What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”
Traveling is a fool’s paradise.
3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness of affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
For everything that is given, something is taken.
Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.
They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Do not seek for things outside of yourself.
1. We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.
the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.
2. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.
From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.
3. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.
4.
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
5. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
6. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison, of misused wine” of the affections.
