Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

We might as easily reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.