The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.

When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,-no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as then need is.

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.