There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable. .. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.