My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.