If you want to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you and what people think of you.

Give me something huge to fight, — and I should enjoy that — but why make me sweep the dust?

I am not aware that payment, or even favors, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest importance.

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands

There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.