We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.