“There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Moonlight is sculpture.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Just keep taking the next step and keep having excellence in the ordinary.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.

Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.

My thing was always trying to do as much as I possibly could do. I wanted to do all the things the other kids did in the neighborhood.

They see me as an ordinary guy, like a construction worker or the guy who delivers your piano.