If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone..

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work..

It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint . . ..

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him..

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage..

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of….

I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the….

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it i….

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting..

Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you ….

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven..

A man cannot speak but he judges himself.

I honor health as the first Muse..

The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there i….

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law..

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something..

A great teacher makes hard things easy..

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the ….

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice a….

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning d….

In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the gr….