Art is evidence of our most creative moment.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life.

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.