 There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance. |
| After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. |
| Nothing endures but personal qualities. |
| Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. |
| To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. |
| Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. |
| In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word. |
| Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? |
| Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed. |
| Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. |
| The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves. |
| I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. |
| The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything. |
| Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy. |
| The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. |
| Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. |
| Freedom - to walk free and own no superior. |
| He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. |
| O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself. |
| A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. |
