Self Quotes - Page 429

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.

Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.

We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.

And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where aour spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints