My greatest skill has been to want but little.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.

Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.