Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession

All... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.