Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
Friendship demands the ability to do without it.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
The only way to have a friend is to be one. -Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
For everything you have missed you have gained something.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
The only gift is a portion of thyself.
When Nature has work to be done, she create a genius to do it.
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.
We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
Cupid is a casuist, a mystic, and a cabalist,-- Can your lurking thought surprise, And interpret your device, . . . . All things wait for and divine him,-- How shall I dare to malign him?
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.