The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. |
The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor |
The bluebird carries the sky on his back. |
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed. |
The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed. |
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. |
The Canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and danger, than ever the New England colonist went, and led them, though not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet |
The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way |
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. |
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run |
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit / not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves. |
The eye is the jewel of the body. |
The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. |
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument. |
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. |