Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

Some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.