We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.

Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.

Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.