[A] morning-land full of immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow… – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No man was ever great without a touch of divine afflatus. – Cicero

Society is doing a great deal for the workingman, for the lower classes; but it seems to me, sometimes, as if it formed associations to obtain for them toys, and then formed other associations to teach them to play with them. – John B. Gough