Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.

The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.

The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones.

For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.