We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not sendmen to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty,... it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.

Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

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.