The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.

But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.