“A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.”

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view.

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.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence that could support this.

Put a girl in the moonlight and tell only truths and every man becomes a poet.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

In order for man to master his life, he must first rule himself.