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.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.

I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

We must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being.