The quote database

The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

To be great is to be misunderstood

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

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.

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

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.

The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

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.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

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

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.

Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.