By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far moreglorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
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.
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that 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.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.