“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”

“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.”

“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul”

“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.”

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”