Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold