Insist on your life, never imitate... do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

Be an opener of doors

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.