Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.