If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.