“You know what love is?It is all kindness, generosity.”

“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.”

“This is not a day for asking questions, not a day on any calendar. This day is conscious of itself. This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness, more manifest than saying can say.”

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. Welcome and entertain them all!”

“From cane reeds, sugar. From a worm's cocoon, silk. Be patient if you can, and from sour grapes will come something sweet.”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.”

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.”

“Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.”

“Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.”

“And it is very much lamented,... That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye That you might see your shadow.”

“Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.”

“In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn.”

“You know who you are, but know not who you could be.”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.”

“The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' ... There is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball.”

“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”

“You think because you understand 'one' you must also understand 'two', because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and'.”

“Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.”