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.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

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.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.

It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.

Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.