A man cannot speak but he judges himself

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.

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.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart apoints.

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.