Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.

To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.