I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.

It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions , from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.

We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.

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.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.

There is but a very minute portion of the creation which we can turn into food and clothes, or gratification for the body; but the whole creation may be used to minister to the sense of beauty.