Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead:…

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through …

A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything.

Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends', not monarchs', calls; My whinstone house my castle is— I have my own four walls.

[I am] fast becoming a patriot of the most decided stamp. Scornfully as I used to speak and think of Scotland in my hours of bitterness and irritation, I never fail to stand up manfully in defence of it thro' thick and thin, whenever a …

Again, and again, we say, the great, the creative and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren and transient is otherwise.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.