Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! -FRIENDSHIP The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blue-berries. Others are liquid and deep, -wells that a man might fall into;-others are agressive and devouring, seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and require crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to protect individuals against them. There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate,-some of good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the will before it can be signified in the eye. -BEHAVIOR Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honour, because he was not lying in wait for these. The things of a man for which we visit him, were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is better than any career. -BEHAVIOR The highest compact we can make with our fellow is,— "Let there be truth between us two forevermore.' + -BEHAVIOR The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. -SELF-RELIANCE I look upon the simple and childish virtues of ve racity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. -ILLUSIONS Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. -GIFTS The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the Soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow. -AN ADDRESS The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye. -BEHAVIOR When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,-no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you ail the time. + -GIFTS The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the Soul. + -THE OVER-SOUL Insist on yourself; never imitate. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. + -SELF-RELIANCE A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those most undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. -FRIENDSHIP We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love. + -FRIENDSHIP Hospitality must be for service and not for show, or it pulls down the host. HEROISM For he that feeds men, serveth few, + -CELESTIAL LOVE The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member wit out a sympathetic injury to all the members. America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous. I + -EMANCIPATION ADDRESS am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. + -NATURE Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. As the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense, poverty prove benefactors. -COMPENSATION The flowering of civilisation is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power, the gentleman. -FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC No sane man at last distrusts himself. His existence is a perfect answer to all sentimental cavils. If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise properties that are required. That we are here, is proof we ought to be here. -CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. SELF-RELIANCE What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us. . . . Hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things. -FATE Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. -WORSHIP Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and to your thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but reform. -THE CONSERVATIVE Generosity does not consist in giving money or money's worth. These so-called goods are only the shadow of good. To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence. . . We owe to man higher succours than food and fire. We owe to man, man. . . . . -DOMESTIC LIFE |