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.

Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is--to teach; the function of the second is--to move, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.

No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.

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

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

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.