I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.

The secret of success in education is respecting the students.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.