Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable.

Character is very much a matter of health.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

Pride is like the beautiful acacia, that lifts its head proudly above its neighbor plants-forgetting that it too, like them, has its roots in the dirt.

Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.