[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.

We judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intensions.

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.