Everything has its price - and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained... it is impossible to get anything without this price.

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.