The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

No facts to me are sacred; none are profane.

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.