How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!

Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

How often, when we have been nearest each other bodily, have we really been farthest off! Our tongues were the witty foils with which we fenced each other off.