The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.