Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.