Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.

"In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life~~no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair."

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Research is not seeing what others do not see, it is seeing the same thing as other people and thinking what they do not.

Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,--epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.