When it is darkest, men see the stars.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

It is an amiable illusion, which the shape of our planet prompts, that every man is at the top of the world.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

We boil at different degrees.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.

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.