When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

A man should carry nature in his head.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.