The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.

When it's time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.

Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

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.