What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.

Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.