What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced.