[D]ivine Providence... keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

Every reform was once a private opinion.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.