The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.

You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.