How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved bythem. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.

All men are children, and of one family.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.

When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.