The world is all gates, all opportunities,
strings of tension waiting to be struck.
If I go into the forest,
I feel all new and undescribed.
We must do nothing without intention.
We do what we must, 
and call it by the best names.
I will not hide my tastes and aversions.
I will so trust that what is deep is holy.
What lies behind us, and what lies before us
are tiny matters,
compared to what lies within us.
We are very near to greatness:
one step and we are safe:
can we not take the leap?
Learn to live with the license of a higher order of being.
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face
for the traits of all his ancestors;
for the expression of all his history and his wants.
Truth is too simple for us;
we do not like those who unmask our illusions.
Man is the point wherein
matter and spirit meet and marry.
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
If eyes were made for seeing,
then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
Light is the first of painters.
Every moment of the year has its own beauty.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
Every man has his own vocation;
his talent is his call.
There is one direction in which all space is open to him.
Skill comes of doing.
Do the thing
and you will have the Power.
Big jobs usually go to the men
who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
Every man I meet
is in some way my superior.
Every man is a hero or an oracle to somebody.
The hearing ear
is always found close to the speaking tongue.
In every man there is something
wherein I may learn of him.
The man of genius inspires us
with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
In every work of genius
we recognize our own rejected thoughts.
All that we do, or say or see
is expression or for expression.
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.
Your genuine action will explain itself,
and will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing.
Insist on yourself.
Never imitate.
What is important is not the length of life,
but the depth of life.
It is the eye which makes every horizon.
The understanding is the eye.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body;
in the evening, only with his legs.
I enjoy all the hours of life.
Whenever you are sincerely pleased
you are nourished.
Guard well your spare moments.
They are like uncut diamonds.
O Day of days when we can read!
If we encounter a man of rare intellect
we should ask him what books he reads.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding
except when he listens to the whisper
which is heard by him alone.
Difficulties exist
to be surmounted.
A man is a golden impossibility.
The line he must walk is a hair's breath.
Our own orbit is all our task...
we need not assist
the administration of the universe.
The height of the pinnacle
is determined by the breadth of the base.
So of cheerfulness, or a good temper,
the more it is spent, the more it remains.
Calmness is always god-like.

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment,
if the same old lawbreaker is to keep them?
The views of nature held by any people
determine all their institutions.
The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own
but fall into institutions already made.
If I know your sect,
I anticipate your argument.
Thought is the property of those only
who can entertain it.
I cannot see what you see,
because I am caught up by a strong wind,
and blown so far in one direction
that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.
The best lightning rod for your protection
is your own spine.
What you are stands over you all the while
and thunders so that I cannot hear
what you are saying to the contrary.
Faith is a telescope.
When it is dark enough,
one can always see the stars.
Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
We never touch but at points.
I like man,
but not men.
The field cannot well be seen within the field.
I wish to say what I think and feel today
with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.
The soul contains the event that shall befall it,
for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts.
What you do,
you possess.
The world belongs
to the energetic.
Life wastes itself
while we are preparing to live.
How much of human life is lost in waiting.
I will not move until I have the highest command.
We do not yet possess ourselves,
and yet we know at the same time
that we are much more.
My chief want in life
is somebody
who shall make me do
what I can do.
You find men everywhere
talking from their memories
instead of from their understanding.
All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
Speak to the heart
and the man suddenly becomes virtuous.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
We are much better believers in immortality
than we can give grounds for.
The real evidence is too subtle,
or is higher than we can write down in propositions.
If a man's eye is on the Eternal,
his intellect will grow.
The consciousness of each man is a sliding scale,
which identifies him now with the First Cause,
and now with the flesh of his body;
life above life, in infinite degrees.
The world is his
who can see through its pretension.
The world is a Dancer;
it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat;
a Mist; a Spider's Snare;
it is what you will;
and the metaphor will hold.
Knowledge is the straight Line,
Wisdom is the power of the straight line,
or the Square;
Virtue is the power of the Square;
or the Solid.
There is no thought in any mind, 
but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, 
and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.
The power of a man increases steadily
by continuance in one direction.
The things that are really for thee
gravitate to thee.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light 
which flashes across his mind from within.
The only thing grief has taught me is how shallow it is.
Be first a good animal.
The sublime is excited in me
by the great stoical doctrine,
Obey thyself.
Dreams and beasts are two keys
by which we find out the keys of our own nature.
Every mind must know
the whole lesson for itself,
must go over the whole ground
what it does not see,
what it does not live,
it will not know.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence
which makes us receivers of its truth
and organs of its activity.
All men believe in a fact,
few believe in a thought.
The ancestor of every action
is a thought.
We are magnets in an iron globe.
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery
All our progress is an unfolding,
like a vegetable bud.
Every man supposes himself
not to be fully understood or appreciated.
It is a luxury to be understood.
Whatever games are played with us,
we must play no games with ourselves.
There is guidance for each of us,
and by lowly listening
we shall hear the right word.
Listen to every prompting of honour.
Whoso would be a man
must be a nonconformist.

The hero is he who is immovably centered.

You cannot escape the demand for courage.
Bad times have a scientific value.
These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Reality, however,
has a sliding floor.
Under every deep
a lower deep opens.
The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.
Be not the slave of your own past -
plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far,
so you shall come back
with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience,
that shall explain the overlook the old.
The creation of a thousand forests
is in one acorn.
Creation is continuous.
In the woods is perpetual youth.
We change whether we like it or not.
What is life
but the angle of vision.
A man is measured by the angle
at which he looks at objects.
From within or behind,
a light shines through us upon things
and makes us aware that we are nothing
but the light is all.
A man is a god in ruins.
I am God in nature;
I am a weed by the wall.
What is a weed?
A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.
The man on whom the soul descends,
through whom the soul speaks,
alone can teach.
The man who can make hard things easy
is an educator.
The method of advance in nature
is perpetual transformation.
What would be the use of immortality
to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
People are to be taken
in very small doses.
Every man has a right to his own ears.
No man can have society
on his own terms.
Insulate a man and you annihilate him.
He cannot unfold,
he cannot live without a world.
It is seldom that man is truly alone.
He needs to retire as much from his solitude
as he does from society...
While I am reading and writing
in my chamber I am not alone
though there is nobody there.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life,
and urge doing.
I am content with knowing,
if only I could know.
This is my design,
to make sketches of the laws of the intellect.
Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol,
and the audience is electrified.
Everything lasts in proportion
to its beauty.
The eye is the first circle;
the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary figure
is repeated without end.
It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
If a man is at once acquainted
with the geometric foundation of things
and with their festal splendor,
his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.
As men's prayers are disease of the will,
so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
I make my own temptations.
I make my own comedy and tragedy.
Everything runs to excess;
every good quality is noxious if unmixed.
I fear the progress of metaphysical philosophy
may be found to consist in nothing else
than the progressive introduction
of opposite metaphors.
The conclusion is irresistible,
that what is a truth or idea in the mind
is a power out there in nature.
The world we live in
is but thickened light.
Life is a train of moods like beads on a string,
and as we pass through them
they prove to be many colored lenses
which paint the world their own hue.
I make my own circumstances.
We live amid surfaces,
and the true art of life is to skate well on them.
Whatever limits us
we call fate.
Fate is unpenetrated causes.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling
but in rising up every time we fall.
Do your work, and I shall know you.
Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
No law can be sacred to me
but that of my own nature.
He felt it an honor, he said, to wash his face,
being as it was the temple of the Spirit.
The measure of mental health
is the disposition to find good everywhere.
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet...
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior
imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being
on a young soul to which they are totally unfit.
Cannot we let people be themselves,
and enjoy life in their own way?
You are trying to make that man another you.
One's enough.
The reality is more excellent
than the report.
Life is not so short
but that there is always time for courtesy.
Character is that
which can do without success.
Rectitude is a perpetual victory,
celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity,
which is joy fixed or habitual.
Nothing is beneath you
if it is in the direction of your life.
Truth is always present;
it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye
to read its oracles.
It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die
but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.
Whatever does not concern us is concealed from us.
Make your own Bible.
Select and collect all those words and sentences
that in all your reading have been to you like
the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare,
Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.
All my best thoughts
were stolen by the ancients.
The nobler the truth or sentiment,
the less imports the question of authorship.
All originality is relative.
Every wall is a door.
Be an opener of doors
for such as come after thee.
Win as if you were used to it,
lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
No great man ever complains
of want of opportunity.
To fill the hour, that is happiness; to fill the hour,
and leave no room for a repentance or an approval.
Things go by pairs.
Thoughts go by pairs.
Extremes meet.
Cause and effect
are two sides of one fact.
Tragedy is like strong acid -
it dissolves away all but the very good of truth.
Things that are natural
are never without a certain grace and excellence.
You must learn to hear the birds' song
without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.
It is the office of a true teacher
to show us that God is, not was;
that he speaketh, not spake.
The great always introduce us to facts;
small men introduce us always to themselves.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance:
it is the infirmity of will.
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates
when he becomes a conformist.
I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.
I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic.
All history becomes subjective;
in other words,
there is properly no history; only biography.
Nature and books
belong to the eyes that see them.
The landscape belongs
to the man who looks at it.
Nature is a mutable cloud
which is always and never the same.
Philosophy is the account which the mind gives to itself
of the constitution of the world.
Time dissipates to shining ether
the solid angularity of facts.
To different minds,
the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to this and that.
With consistency
a great soul has simply nothing to do.
A foolish consistency
is the hobgoblin of little minds.
All sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together,
To make up a year
And a sphere.
Before the revelations of the soul,
Time and Space and Nature
shrink away.
What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two,
in a thought, in a feeling?
The only sin is limitation.
That which we call sin in others,
is experiment for us.
Affirmative.
Set down nothing
but what will help somebody.
Every man has a right
to be valued at his best moment.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
Genius has no taste
for weaving sand.
When a dog is chasing after you,
whistle for him.
What a new face
courage puts on everything.
A man is known
by the books he reads,
by the company he keeps,
by the praise he gives,
by his dress,
by his tastes,
by his distastes,
by the stories he tells,
by his gait,
by the motion of his eye,
by the look of his house,
of his chamber,
for nothing on earth is solitary,
but everything hath affinities infinite.
The only person you are destined to become
is the person you decide to be.
All we ask of any man
is that he should thoroughly like
his own way of life.
We must be our own
before we can be another's.
I delight in long walks.
These free my brain and serve my body.
Many eyes go through the meadow,
but few see the flowers in it.
Flowers...are a proud assertion
that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Nature, who made the lock,
knows where to find the key.
Blessed is the day when the youth discovers
that Within and Above are synonyms.
The key to every man is his thought...
He can only be reformed by showing him
a new idea which commands his own.
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed;
there is not winter and no night;
all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, - all duties even.
The one thing of value in the universe
is the active soul.
To be awake is to be alive.
I never met a man who was quite alive.
The true test of civilization
is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops -
no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Every true man
is a cause, a country, and an age.
Men of character are the conscience of the society
to which they belong.
When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another,
the practiced man relies on the language of the first.
Nature always wears the color the spirit.
There is no object in nature
which intense light will not make more beautiful.
We cannot do wrong
without suffering wrong.
Say what thou wilt but pay the price.
Whatever games are played with us,
we must play no games with ourselves.
Men are respectable
only as they respect.
He is a good man
who can receive a gift well.
It was a high counsel
that I once heard given to a young person, -
"Always do what you are afraid to do."
The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly;
the peas make no mistake,
but come up and show his line.
Life is perpetual instruction
in cause and effect.
I am defeated all the time,
yet to victory I am born.
What is important
is to take your soul out of time,
as every sublime act does.
You are in that place to testify.
If you would lift me up
you must be on higher ground.
The reason why men do not obey us
is because they see the mud
at the bottom of our eye.
What I must do is all that concerns me,
not what people think.
Can anything be as elegant
as having few wants
and to serve them oneself?
If you want to be happy, be.
I compared notes with one of my friends
who expects everything of the universe,
and is disappointed when anything is less than the best,
and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expect nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.
There are some men above grief
and some men below it.
Little minds have little worries,
big minds have no time for worries.
The meaning of good and bad, of better or worse,
is simply helping or hurting.
It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.
Let us be poised,
and wise and our own, today.
There are no days in life so memorable
as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
To live in a field of pumpkins,
yet eat no pie!
You carry your fortune in your own hand.
Progress is the activity of today
and the assurance of tomorrow.
A man's action
is only a picture book of his creed.
Go put your creed
into your deed.
Convert life into truth.
Make circumstances - all circumstances -
conform to the law of your mind.
Nothing external to you
has any power over you.
Self-command is the main elegance.
My life is not an apology, but a life.
It is for itself and not for the spectator.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live.
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
To fill the hour and leave no crevice -
that is happiness.
Man is a stream
whose source is hidden.
The ship of heaven guides itself
and will not accept a wooden rudder.
The heart has its arguments,
with which the understanding is not acquainted.
Thou art to me a delicious torment.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
A wise man always throws himself
on the side of his assailants.
It is more his interest than it is theirs
to find his weak point.
If you would rule the world quietly,
you must keep it amused.
The reality of things is thought.
It is the secret of power.
The perception of the cosmic
is a tie of sympathy with other men,
a pledge of sanity, and a protection
from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanity
in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Every spirit builds itself a house,
and beyond its house, a world,
and beyond its world, a heaven.
Know then that world exists for you.
Every spirit makes its house;
but afterwards the house confines the spirit.
Is not prayer a study of truth,
a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? -
No man ever prayed heartily
without learning something.
Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic
to those inquiries he would put.
He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
A spark of fire is infinitely deep,
but a mass of fire reaching upward into heaven,
this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul.
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world.
Thought is the blossom,
language the bud,
action the fruit behind.
Imagination is the morning,
memory the evening of the mind.
Your work,
as Ruskin says,
should be the praise of what you are.
Is it not the chief disgrace of the world,
not to be a unit; not to be reckoned one character;
not to yield that peculiar fruit with each man was created to bear,
but to be reckoned in the gross,
in the hundred, or thousand,
or the part, the section, to which we belong;
and our opinion predicted geographically,
as the north or south?
All power is of one kind,
a sharing of the nature of the world.
To finish the moment,
to find the journey's end in every step of the road,
to live the greatest number of good hours,
that is wisdom.
Why need I volumes
if one word suffice?
The universe
is the externalization of the soul.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all
They call it Christianity.
I call it consciousness.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
So live as to be ready to die.
When you have worn out your shoes,
the strength of the sole leather
has passed into the fiber of your body.
The silent organ loudest chants
The master's requiem.
Good Thoughts in Bad Times
The flowering of geometry
The grey past,
the white future.
strong star-bright companions
Self-kindled every atom glows
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