If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat "I will not love you."

Do your work, but do your thing.