What is indispensable to inspiration? ...sound sleep and the provocation of a good book or a companion.

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good insome particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.