To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.

A man's perfection is his work.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.