583 quotes
Conversation is a game of circles.
Essays: First Series (1841)
Conformity is the ape of harmony.
The clergy are as like as peas.
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance with joy.
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.
Representative Men (1850)
Each the herald is who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate.
Poems (1847)
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.
Society and Solitude (1870)
A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?
Divinity College Address (1838)
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
Poems (1847)
Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ.
Literary Ethics (1838)
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.
Poems (1847)
The cup of life is not so shallow
That we have drained the best
That all the wine at once we swallow
And lees make all the rest.
Journals (1822)
For the world was built in order
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
I can find Greece and Palestine and Italy and England and the Islands, the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!
May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.
Men are what their mothers made them.
If a man own land, the land owns him.