The soul awakes ... between two dim eternities - the eternal past, the eternal future.

Once, in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature, — loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.

No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.

I 'spect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me.

That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.

Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty!

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.