39 quotes
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
Journals (1822)
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
Journals (1822)
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Journals (1822)
No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.
Journals (1822)
The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.
Journals (1822)
It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.
Journals (1822)
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Journals (1822)
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Journals (1822)
There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.
Journals (1822)
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
Journals (1822)
People say law but they mean wealth.
Journals (1822)
A nation never falls but by suicide.
Journals (1822)
Blessed are those who have no talent!
Journals (1822)
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)
He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
Journals (1822)
I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
Journals (1822)
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Journals (1822)
The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
Journals (1822)
I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.
Journals (1822)