All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

I am not afraid of praise, for I have practiced it on myself.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.