A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.

A man without self-restraint is like a barrel without hoops, and tumbles to pieces.

Some sorrows are but footprints in the snow, which the genial sun effaces, or, if it does not wholly efface, changes into dimples.

Victories that come cheap are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.

This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.

If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and earning it become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.