601
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
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602
if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours
603
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
604
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.
605
The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.
606
To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.
607
In society you will not find health, but in nature.
608
Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
609
Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.
610
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
611
There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.
612
If citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.
613
The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.
614
Our whole system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.
615
Surely civilization is old enough, surely mankind is mature enough so that we ought in our own lifetime to find a way to permanent peace.
616
The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.
617
It is not down in any map; true places never are
618
any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him
619
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
620
paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell
621
The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
622
The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
623
The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.
624
The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press
625
The evil cannot be cured or remedied by silence as to its existence.