Common sense is as rare as genius.

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?

Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind.