There is nothing we value and hunt and cultivate and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.