Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.