Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.

He that openly tells, his friends all that he thinks of them, must expect that they will secretly tell his enemies much that they do not think of him.

If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.

Peace is the evening star of the soul, as virtue is its sun, and the two are never far apart.