To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

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

No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.

The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.