Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.