The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

A day is a miniature eternity.

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.