I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-borne treasures home.

The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.

The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.