Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.