A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked what I thought, and attended to my answer.
