“It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it.”

“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.”

“A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.”

“You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.”

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”

“At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.”

“Some of your griefs you have cured,And the sharpest you still have survived,But what torments of grief you've enduredFrom evils that never arrived.”