To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.

Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?

Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.

The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.

truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?