Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.