“brings domesticity and common sense, and that propriety which every man loves, directly into this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed.”

“Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.”

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. ”

“The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”

“Common sense is as rare as genius.”

“What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment, man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.”

“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”