If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is thereforeuseful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

The city is recruited from the country.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.