All quotes

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

do not hope to excite love except by love

To sleep is to strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, to calm the fever of the soul

Courage returns as we gaze; when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again.

To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.

Man is only what he becomes--profound truth; but he becomes only what he is, truth still more profound.

depend upon it, you will love your native hills the better for being separated from them

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!

Tell all my friends in Concord that I do not send my love, but retain it still.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference.

My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets.

Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him--I should keep myself rather--at a more respectful distance.

The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!

At death our friends and relations either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart further from us and are forgotten.

Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as it were redeemed.

Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible, that he has prejudices.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.