When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.

God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.