The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled upin the skull of Napoleon!

The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger--so it be done for love, and not forostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe.

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.