A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.