In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.

Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.

The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.