Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.