How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.

All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.

In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.

The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.