I have been out again on the river, rowing. I find nothing new.

[On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.

Assuredly of all earthly conditions uncertainty is the most unblest.

When marriage is what it ought to be, it is indeed the very happiest condition of existence.

Rome ... seems to me the place in the world where one can best dispense with happiness.

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

I want to do everything in the world that can be done.