We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.