We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.

I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had.

There is no beginning too small.

Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.