Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.

My soul is not a palace of the past.