The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled upin the skull of Napoleon!

[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.

But, if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from these heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime... But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.