The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

The world - this shadow of the soul, or other me - lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult... So much only of life as I know by experience... The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.