A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

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

The pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.