Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.

When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.