Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.