Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

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.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

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

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

'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 progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

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.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend!

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

Your goodness must have some edge to it, -- else it is none.

Insist on yourself; never imitate...Every great man is a unique.

The force of character is cumulative.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.