Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know.

I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the leastact of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode.

Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.