The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

It is rare to find a man who believes in his own thoughts or speaks that which he is created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own...feel yourself, and be not daunted by things...The light by which we see this world comes out from the soul of the observer.

Deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.