Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.