Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.
I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
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.
I may be as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
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.
The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.
I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
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 art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.