Essayist Quotes

“A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic.”

“The earth laughs in flowers.”

“There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.”

“Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.”

“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”

“Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind.”

“To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.”

“Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.”

“The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.”

“Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.”

“Behold the Sea,The opaline, the plentiful and strong,Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,Purger of earth, and medicine of men;Creating a sweet climate by my breath,Washing out harms and griefs from memory,And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,Giving a hint of that which changes not.”

“Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.”

“When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.”

“But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

“The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.”

“Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.”

“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”

“The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity.”

“Knowledge is the only elegance.”

“All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.”

“If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review,in such manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.”

“An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”

“Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?”

“The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days & more of them, than any other country.”