What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace withoutgrandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,--which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.

There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.

Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on.