“When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.”

“The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

“There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”

“Clergymen, judges, statesmen--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day--stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”

“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.”

“I have an almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt to get me out to dinner.”