Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.