All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

A great man is always willing to be little.

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.