The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.