[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

God shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authoritative perfection, but even the perfection of obedience--an obedience to His own laws; and in the cumbrous movement of those unwieldiest of his creatures we are reminded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human creature "that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.

Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.

Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.