This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.

A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.

We do not believe in immortality because we can't prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.

Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.