It all begins when the soul would have its way with you.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.

Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.

We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.