“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

“Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.”

“Beauty without expression is boring.”

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”

“When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

“The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.”