The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.

We come to our own and would make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!

The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.