That we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have little faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.

The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.