| |  | | | | | | | | | | | If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. | | Dreams; Happiness; Life; Success | | | 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. All nature is your congratulation . . . | | Uncategorized | | | If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. | | Uncategorized | | | If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness. | | Uncategorized | | | If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonal experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. | | Uncategorized | | | If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. | | Uncategorized | | | If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention. | | Uncategorized | | | 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 | | Uncategorized | | | If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things | | Uncategorized | | | If you give money, spend yourself with it. | | Money | | | If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. There is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. | | Dreams | | | If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. | | Uncategorized | | | In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains. | | Uncategorized | | | In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. | | Uncategorized | | | | | In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. | | Uncategorized | | | | | In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain - I find no sea room - but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. | | Uncategorized | | | In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny | | Literature | | In the streets and in society I am almost invariably
cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean.
No amount of gold or respectability would in the least
redeem it,-- dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!!
But alone in the distant woods or fields,
in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits,
even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this,
when a villager would be thinking of his inn,
I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related,
and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.
I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent
to what others get by churchgoing and prayer.
I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.
I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are,
grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day
about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it.
I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America,
out of my head and be sane a part of every day. | | Solitude | | | | | | | |
