It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.