Everyone believes that he abounds in wisdom, but is short of money.

[The imagination] . . . inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and . . . a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.

. . . the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take . . . a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me. . . .

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room. . . .

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.