Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.

I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

Meek young men grow up in libraries.