Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.