The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

Luck is just another word for tenacity of purpose.

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.