To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

The eye is easily frightened.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.