We were born to succeed, not to fail.

I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

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.