Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.

I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.