The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.