No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.

Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.