Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.

And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day.

[on Thoreau:] He decided to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living.

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will...

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work—declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.

Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

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