Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Self Esteem::"It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred."

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another.