The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!