The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were….

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back..

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to….

Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness..

As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like….

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction..

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health..

I was not born to be forced..

As they say in geology, time never fails, there is always enough of it, so I may say, criticism never fails..

Most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, ….

So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old..

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, ….

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!.

If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by be….

In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,--fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other..

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it..

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy..

If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration, that….

The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory..

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only th….