24 quotes
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
The Method of Nature (1841)
Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.
Society and Solitude (1870)
Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
Nature (1836)
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love.
Essays (1876)
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes;
The lover rooted stays.
May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
Journals (1822)
We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Society and Solitude (1870)
And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is ever wide.
May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
Journals (1822)
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.
Poems (1847)
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
Poems (1847)
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,—
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.