I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.

We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between theilliterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.

In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.