Truths and roses have thorns about them.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.

The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor.