The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.

You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The greatest homage to truth is to use it.