All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed,but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it.

Nature spontaneously keeps us well. Do not resist her!

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.

We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?'

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.