171 quotes
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.
The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor.
The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Beware how you take away hope from any human being.
Man has his will,—but woman has her way!
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!
A Mortal Antipathy (1885)
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men, — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)
There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' .
Elsie Venner (1859)
It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.
Elsie Venner (1859)
He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)