No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.