Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.