"Has any man, or any society of men, a truth to speak, a piece of spiritual work to do; they can nowise proceed at once and with the mere natural organs, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner; in a word, construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and do it. Without machinery, they were hopeless, helpless."

"Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom with Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business, to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism."

"Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery."

"Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster."

"No solitary miscreant, scarcely any solitary maniac, would venture on such actions and imaginations, as large communities of sane men have, in such circumstances, entertained as sound wisdom."

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."

"A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge."

"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."

"The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist."

"When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze."

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies."

"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will."

"A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."

"Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light."

"The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.""

"There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done."

"We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth.""

"His religion at best is an anxious wish, — like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps."

"How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?"

"A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility."

"We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad."

"Clever men are good, but they are not the best."

"In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded."

"Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself."

"Hadst thou not Greek enough to understand thus much: The end of man is an Action, and not a Thought, though it were the noblest."

"With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much."

"[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 renegade Scot takes upon him to abuse it."

"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it."

"What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite."

"Wonder is the basis of worship."

"Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe."

"Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."

"Be not the slave of Words."

"Man is a tool-using animal...Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."

"He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing."