A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.

Yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success.

How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.