Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity—which nature cannot repair.

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The soul is the receiver of the Over-Soul; it is the organ of that divine life which flows into it and through it.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty.

The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there, anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls through all.

The act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

Every man is a channel through which heaven would pour forth its gifts, if he did not block the way.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

The field cannot be well seen from within the field; you must climb the mountain to understand the valley.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner: first in the thing done, and secondly in the doer.

The dice of God are always loaded. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed.

He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

There is no history; only biography.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for nothing but to inspire.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

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

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we shall know the way.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

I am thankful for small mercies. I have discovered that I am not the master of the suite of mood-plants that grow in my garden.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, but the spiritual inspiration that comes when you discover that someone believes in you.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung.

The years teach much which the days never know.

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

The world makes way for the man who knows whither he is going.

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

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.

Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Every spirit makes its house, but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

We must be very suspicious of the pretenses of the world to help us.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

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

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy way of doing things.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament.

A great man is always willing to be little.

The world is a festival only to the wise.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

Do not bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

Every thought which genius thinketh, he might think; had other men but thought it before, he would have thought it also.

We find in ourselves the labyrinth of which the world is the outer wall.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Great men exist that there may be greater men.

The world is mathematical, and has no pity.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Don't be 'consistent'—be simply true.

He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

The first wealth is health.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Peace is not the absence of conflict from life, but the ability to cope with it.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

What you seek is seeking you.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.