A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.

In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more ofthese drones perish, the better for the hive.

You cannot see the mountain near.

Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.

A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.

A man's action is only a poicture book of his creed.