A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.

I was determined to know beans.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

If some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success.