The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

God hides things by putting them near us.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

How casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.