...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature.