Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.

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.

For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?

By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry.