Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

How imperceptibly the first springing takes place!

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.