The quote database

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

Having treated my friend ill, I wished to apologize; but, not meeting him, I made an apology to myself.

What signifies the census--this periodical numbering of men--to one who has no friend?

Our thoughts would imply that other men have friends, though we have not.

My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.

Now at least the moon is full, and I walk alone, which is best by night, if not by day always.

Our life is frittered away by detail

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer