The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

The cardinal virtue of a teacher [is] to protect the pupil from his own influence.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.