With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea--that conserves it; ideas only save races.

Shallow men believe in luck.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent