Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight.

Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.

All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.

I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.