Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it.

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

The lover of letters loves power too.