“Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.”

Blest hour! It was a luxury–to be!

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

There is one art of which people should be masters – the art of reflection.

Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,–the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts.

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where “I admire” is but a synonyme for “I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ,” is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!

A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

Man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.