That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.

One must be an inventor to read well.

In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.

Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.

Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.