Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope that it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

The religions we call false were once true.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.