“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”

“Man is a tool using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”

“Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.”

“In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.”

“To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”

“Great men taken up in any way are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him.”

“History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.”