Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,--that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,--who is invariably the devil,--and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,--who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

I suppose that the great questions of "Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute," which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled.