Life is too short for reading inferior books.

In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid Nature.

California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital.

Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know the things he thinks he knows.

There is in the American Government...a want of unity.... The Sailors, the helmsman, the engineer, do not seem to have one purpose or obey one will so that instead of making steady way the vessel may pursue a devious or zigzag course, and sometimes merely turn round and round in the water.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.