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.

When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.

There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.