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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitud...more

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This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from ...more

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No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.

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None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or t...more

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Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of a...more

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A man is known by the books he reads.

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The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your...more

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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, ...more

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Imitation cannot go above its model.

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Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God with...more

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Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

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The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average ten...more

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Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.