Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Souls are not saved in bundles.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Never lose an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful. It is God's handwriting a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.