Men are respectable only as they respect.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.

We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?

The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.