Trees, though they are cut and lopped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.

Our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.

This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The true spirit of delight, the exultation—the sense of being more than Man—is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.

Think this way about our fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

The true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him.

Everything's a rabbit hole.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

These are my two drops of rain
Waiting on the window-pane…
All the best and all the worst
Comes from which of them is first…
John is there, and John has won!
Look! I told you! Here's the sun!

“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.