Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

I attended [Sir Humphry] Davy's lectures to renew my stock of metaphors.

Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get his own belief.

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.