All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.

Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.