The ideas of things intellectually known pass into the substance of the intellect much more than do foods into the substance of the body.

[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.

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.

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.

What is odious but . . . people . . . who toast their feet on the register. . . .

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?