223 quotes
Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
Shows sof'ness in the upper story.
The Biglow Papers (1848)
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870)
This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur.
The Biglow Papers (1848)
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
Poems: Second Series (1848)
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
The Present Crisis (1844)
That love for one, from which there doth not spring
Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.
Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote.
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (1865)
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgement.
The First Need of American Culture (1894)
My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:
Don't never prophesy — onless ye know.
The Biglow Papers (1848)
Earth's biggest country 's gut her soul,
An' risen up earth's greatest nation.
The Biglow Papers (1848)
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.
Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.
The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.
Poems: Second Series (1848)
As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
Heartsease and Rue (1888)
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.
Fable for Critics (1848)
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.
A Fable for Critics (1848)
He gives us the very quintessence of perception.
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.