A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Genius is its own end.

The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.