“To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?”

“No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.”

“Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”

“The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.”

“As many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.... Will these, too, seperate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.”

“The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.”