Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.

The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.

As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.

We must be doing something to be happy.

This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.