Meek young men grow up in libraries.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

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