Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic.

if have got my spindle and my distaff ready--my pen and mind--never doubting for an instant that God will send me flax.

It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.

A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not begun to comprehend the real nature of religion.

No man ever feels the restraint of law so long as he remains within the sphere of his liberty -- a sphere, by the way, always large enough for the full exercise of his powers and the supply of all his legitimate wants.

Music was a thing of the soul — a rose-lipped shell that murmured of the eternal sea — a strange bird singing the songs of another shore.

This world of sense, built by the imagination--how fair and foul it is! Like a fairy island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight and sleeps in green, known of the world not by communion of knowledge, but by personal, secret discovery!