That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

You must not count much upon what I can do or learn in New York.... Everything there disappoints me but the crowd; rather, I was disappointed with the rest before I came. I have no eyes for their churches, and what else they find to brag of. Though I know but little about Boston, yet what attracts me, in a quiet way, seems much meaner and more pretending than there,--libraries, pictures, and faces in the street. You don't know where any respectability inhabits.

It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.

Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.