Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong.

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him, It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.

The aster has not wasted spring and summer because it has not blossomed. It has been all the time preparing for what is to follow, and in autumn it is the glory of the field, and only the frost lays it low. So there are many people who must live forty or fifty years, and have the crude sap of their natural dispositions changed and sweetened before the blossoming time can come; but their lives have not been wasted.