Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.