[Nature said] The sea shall disjoin the people [of England] from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars . . . seafaring . . .

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

. . . the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take . . . a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me. . . .

Law it is . . . which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet and seizes without hands.

Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men . . .

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.

Everyone believes that he abounds in wisdom, but is short of money.

No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room. . . .

Mortal men ask God for good things every day, but they never pray that they may make good use of them.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.