Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

The greatest homage to truth is to use it.

All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

...What torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived? and may never!

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Sorrow makes us all children again.