Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.

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The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

If I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.

Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

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.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

For my greatest skill has been to want but little.

This [...] government [...] has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man cam bend it to his will.

So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.

It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.