The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

The student is to read history actively and not passively.

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.

Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.