The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

Laws, written, if not on stone tables, yet on the azure of infinitude, in the inner heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain as death, are there, and thou shalt not disobey them.

All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.