“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.”

“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.”

“Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.”

“It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.”

“the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”

“Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”