Quotes About Connection

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more. Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?

If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, The Gods are to each other not unknown. Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive

Keep your friendships in repair.

the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason.

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.

There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck that turns the head.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me.