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Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

One's beliefs have long been thought to be sanctuaries which government could not invade.

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.

Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he seeks it with disquiet, that he cannot regain it?

it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric

A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.

Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.

The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.

Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines

It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances.

In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.

Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point-blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining

In judging others a man laboureth in vain; he often erreth, and easily falleth into sin; but in judging and examining himself he always laboureth to good purpose.

Never had I felt confinement less—I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.