1. “All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.”
2. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard mask… strike, strike through the mask!”
3. “A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
4. “An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”
5. “A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
6. “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”
7. “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.”
8. “From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.”
9. "If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid."
10. “Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
11. “In things abstract, men but differ in the sounds that come from their mouths, and not in the wordless thoughts lying at the bottom of their beings.”
12. "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
13. ”It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
14. “Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.”
15. ”Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.”
16. “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
17. “Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.”
18. "Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world..No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, we are without father or mother."
19. “The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.”
20. “... the days went slowly round and round, endless and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces! How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-like it swung to the ship's dull roll, and ticked hour and ages.”
21. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
22. “Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”
23. “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”
24. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.”
25. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”
26. "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, ouractions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects."
27. “Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.”
28. “Where does the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blending enter into the other. So with sanity and insanity.”
