Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.

You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.