If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.