I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.