The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Research is not seeing what others do not see, it is seeing the same thing as other people and thinking what they do not.

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.