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

There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.

Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.