Real action is in silent moments.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back.

Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.