Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end.

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.