Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascinationfor all educated Americans.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good. . . . If we will take the good we find, . . . we shall have heaping measures. . . .

And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings