When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work , but the solidest thing we know.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.

Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

Of Nature itself upon the soul; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors; the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry; a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.

There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them.