If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.