Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.