It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds.

The hills are reared, the seas are scooped in vain If learning's altar vanish from the plain.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

A man may quarrel with himself alone; that is, by controverting his better instincts and knowledge when brought face to face with temptation.

I laugh, for hope hath a happy place with me; If my boat sinks, 'tis to another sea.

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

Be true to your own highest convictions.