The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

We can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable.

Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.